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About the Speaker
Wissam Harake is the World Bank’s senior economist for Lebanon. He joined the institution’s macroeconomics and fiscal management global practice in August 2013. Dr. Harake currently works on in-depth macroeconomic research, analysis, monetary and market monitoring and forecasts. He is the principal author and team leader for the ‘Lebanon Economic Monitor (LEM)’, which is the main regular publication by World Bank on Lebanon’s macroeconomy and the source of the Bank’s macroeconomic forecasts. The LEM has received wide local, regional and international media coverage. Before joining the Bank, Dr. Harake worked at the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC (2011-2013) as an economist in the Africa/Middle East department, where he conducted in-depth macroeconomic analyses and forecasts for selected countries in the region, namely Iraq, Ghana, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, and Qatar. Dr. Harake has a Ph.D. in economics from American University in Washington, DC, with a focus on international finance, monetary economics, and macroeconomics. His dissertation examined the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the viability of a monetary union in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). He has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical engineering, cum laude, from the same academic in institution.
About the Talk
The presentation aims to examine the Lebanon economic and financial crisis with a focus on macroeconomic conditions, placing it inside a global prism that compares it to the most severe global crisis episodes since the mid-1800s. The talk will underscore the role of deliberate policy inaction in precipitating the deliberate depression.