Lebanon’s misguided government subsidies are quickly eating up its foreign reserves

Leila Dagher () and Raoul Nehme

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Before eliminating the current subsidy program, the Government of Lebanon should introduce an Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) program as a compensation to its heavily-impacted citizens. UCTs have proven to be more efficient and cheaper than subsidizing goods or even distributing in-kind donations such as food boxes, and have lower overhead compared to Conditional Cash Transfer programs. While the richer families benefit more from the current subsidy scheme, UCT better targets the poor and more vulnerable families and limits any abuse or misuse of public funds. More importantly, UCT will put an end or at the very least drastically reduce across the border smuggling since prices of fuel and other items will rise to reflect market prices.

Keywords: lebanon; subsidies; cash transfers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/116138/1/MPRA_paper_116138.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:116138

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().