Over three years after it began, the Syria crisis continues to weigh extremely heavily upon Lebanon. Around a quarter of its population is now made up of refugees, whose needs remain dire even as the resources available to address them appear to be shrinking.
This paper examines the impact of a rise in the Value Added Tax (VAT) on poverty and inequality in Lebanon. It develops an empirical model based on consumer demand theory and uses only household survey data on expenditures and spatial price indexes.
Most theorists maintain that social exclusion is a process, not only the condition reflecting the outcome of that process. Yet few, if any, people ever reach the ultimate end of the imagined trajectory.
