This isn’t Greece

look at the numbers quickly licenses the growing concern over Lebanon’s debt outlook. The fiscal deficit at the end of the third quarter of 2018 is more than twice that of 2017 for the same period. Two main factors contributed to its escalation: the 21 percent rise in personnel cost generated by the wage and salary increases adopted in the last quarter of the 2017 budget, and the eight percent escalation in the debt service cost. The latter reflects both higher debt and higher interest rates, with the latest treasury bill issues having commanded an interest rate increase of 2.5 percent and having reached ten percent on the ten