* P.M. Hariri in The Economist Round Table On Lebanon: A few Thoughts

A few minutes ago, PM Hariri ended his Q&A session at the Economist Roundtable conference.

Some observations:

Mr. Hariri spoke in English all the time, but most of his answers
were those of a politician, not those of an economist.

The exchange that I found most instructive: When Mr. Daniel
Franklin, executive editor of The Economist asked Mr.
Hariri how he could reconcile the need for constant compromise in
his unity government with the need to get things done, Mr. Hariri
said (I’m paraphrasing): We have all agreed in the government
to keep the citizens’ daily lives separate from politics.

Think of that for a second: the citizens’ daily lives
(policies on utilities, growth, communications) are separate from
the issues people go to the polls to vote for. Mr. Hariri spelled
out what we mostly knew all along: Differences between political
parties in Lebanon have nothing to do with economic policy.

Mr. Franklin followed up on this question (paraphrasing): We know
that compromise requires a lot of patience and willingness to
accommodate others, but are there any red lines you would not
allow anyone to cross?

Here I found Mr. Hariri’s red lines quite instructive. First,
without even pausing or thinking, he mentioned freedom of speech,
which I found encouraging. The other two were:

* Fiscal discipline (‘The government will not incur costs
without first offsetting them with income’). Nice. This
explains why Lebanon is #2 in the region in “Labor Market
Flexibility”, a little factoid I picked up from the
Economist Intelligence Unit’s report on Lebanon.

* “The security and safety of the Lebanese people”. I
don’t really know what he meant by that (no coalition partner
will propose a bill to go around and randomly kill Lebanese
people), but I guess it’s a political necessity for him to
say this.
A good session in general but short on details. Those will be
left for the wonks at the Economist to take up with the Finance
Minster and the Governor of the Bank of Lebanon.