
Three condo buildings pictured during dusk in Beirut, in 2024. (Credit: Sandrine Frem and Pao Ibrahim/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT — Lebanon received $6.7 billion in remittances (funds received by a country from its diaspora) in 2023, according to the latest report published by The Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD) and the World Bank Group (WBG).
This number, which is in line with numbers released by the Banque du Liban (BDL) in May 2024, is four percent higher than that of 2022 (which stood around $6.43 billion), and exceeds the World Bank’s previous remittances forecast for 2023, which was estimated to reach $6.4 billion.
The report also found that remittance receipts constitute 30.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Lebanon, which represents the third highest in the world, behind Tonga (41 percent of GDP), and Tajikistan (39 percent).
Compared with other Middle Eastern countries, Lebanon received the third largest amount of remittances last year, after Egypt, at $19.5 billion, and Morocco, at $11.8 billion. However, in terms of percentage of GDP, Lebanon comes in first by a long stretch. Next highest is the West Bank and Gaza, at 18.8 percent of the GDP, and then Jordan, with 8.8 percent of its GDP.
Remittance receipts also account for more than 80 percent of total external flows in Lebanon — the sum of remittances, foreign direct investments (FDI), and official development assistance (ODA). According to the report, this highlights “the importance of the Lebanese diaspora’s impact on the country’s macroeconomy,” and “the importance of remittances for funding the current account and fiscal shortfalls.”
Money inflows from abroad have helped many Lebanese families remain afloat amid an economic crisis that decimated the value of the Lebanese lira and pushed over 44 percent of the population below the poverty line.
Outward remittance flows — or money flowing from Lebanon to foreign countries — was estimated to be around $1.77 billion in 2023, slightly up from $1.73 in 2022 (+2.1 percent), but remains way below its pre-crisis level, which was $4.33 billion in 2019. As the U.S. dollar went missing from the Lebanese market in the first two years of the crisis, paying migrant workers in foreign currency had become an almost impossible task.
As a result, migrant workers who no longer got paid were unable to send money back to their home countries, causing the number of outward remittances to be slashed by more than half compared to 2019.