This paper examines the usefulness of the public sector balance sheet approach (assets and liabilities) in assessing the recent development of Lebanon's financial vulnerabilities in the public sector.
Because of the limitations with the currently available data for the public sector balance sheet in Lebanon, the approach that has been chosen in this paper is inspired from the new BSA and limited to the assessment of the public sector vulnerabilities through the analysis of the main stock variable in the public sector balance sheet: public debt stock.
Only data related to the government's liabilities balance sheet (on the debt stock) was available by maturity, sector and currency. For this reason, this paper focuses, in its first part, on the debt stock in Lebanon and its evolution during the last decade. In its second part, this paper attempts to explain the evolution of the Lebanese domestic debt through a new perception based on the impact of business sentiment on the domestic public debt.
Keywords: Balance sheet (assets, liabilities); Maturity risk; Currency risk; Stock
Biography: Sana Souaid Jad received her PhD. in International Economics from Paris I – Sorbonne University in 2003. She joined the Central Bank of Lebanon in 2004 as a senior economist in the Statistics and Economic Research Department. Dr. Souaid is also a teaching professor at the faculty of Business in the “Université Saint-Esprit Kaslik” USEK since 2004. She has conducted research in several fields in economics and has recently published a paper on the usefulness of qualitative data in monitoring and forecasting the lebanese economic activity. The paper was presented at the fifth IFC conference on “Initiatives to Address Data Gaps Revealed by the Financial Crisis” in Basel on the 25th of August 2010.