
Lebanese lira banknotes. (Credit: João Sousa/L'Orient Today/File photo)
Lebanon’s Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), which measures the direction of economic trends and manufacturing in the private sector, recorded a four-month low of 48.8 in April, down from 49.4 in March (-1 percent).
Published by BlomInvest, the PMI is calculated as the weighted average of five components including new orders, output, employment, suppliers’ delivery times and stocks of purchases.
April’s index shows the morale of the Lebanese private sector seems to be on the decline, and indicates its fast “deterioration” since December last year.
According to the report, published on Wednesday, the drop was mainly driven by weaker demand and a subsequent decline in business activity, resulting from increasing geopolitical tensions as Israel continues its war on Gaza — a war that has spilled over in southern Lebanon.
Lebanon's trade deficit — or the difference between the country's imports and exports — fell by 6.6 percent in 2023 to $14.5 billion, according to recently published customs figures compiled in several bank reports.
This drop does not, however, reflect an improvement in the country's trade activity, which has been in crisis since 2019, but is essentially the result of lower imports, down by around eight percent compared to 2022, for a total of $17.5 billion.
Exports fell by a sharp 14.5 percent, reaching a total of $3 billion in 2023, a low value compared to the last ten years, according to data published on the Customs website.
In its latest annual report on the state of world tourism, published in April, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) estimated that the tourism sector's share of Lebanese GDP was falling in 2024, compared to 2023.
The organization has estimated that tourism will account for 5.5 percent of Lebanese GDP in 2024, compared to 6.6 percent in 2023, a drop of 1.1 percent. The WTTC points out, however, that the numbers in 2024 remain higher than 2022, the sector's first year of effective recovery after two years marked by crisis and restrictions following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The recovery of tourism in Lebanon, which began in 2022 and continued into 2023, is threatened by the fallout from Israel’s war on Gaza, which has been spilling over the border into southern Lebanon since October 2023.
Fuel prices dropped on Friday, according to the latest price list published by the Energy Ministry, while the price of the gas cylinder remained unchanged.
Here are the new rates: