DAMASCUS: As the Syrian crisis enters its fifth year in March, the gross domestic product, which was above $60 billion in 2010, has fallen by more than half, and the total war losses, which the UN Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) estimated at nearly $140 million last year, has increased.
The citizens are paying a heavy cost as a result of wage inflation, which decreased, as the Syrian pound exchange rate against the US dollar has deteriorated by nearly four and a half times, from 45 pounds to more than 210 pounds.
These negative developments have contributed to the increase in the number of poor, according to a UN Development Program (UNDP) report. More than half of the Syrian people have become poor, as 6.9 million citizens have fallen below the poverty line, including 4.4 million living under the line of extreme poverty.
The UNDP defines poverty as “the lack of choices and opportunities in the key areas of education, health and income generation,” which means the lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society.
The ESCWA notes that 4 million Syrians live below the food-poverty line, compared to 200,000 in 2010, and that the number of Syrians who live below the lower poverty line has grown from 2 million to 8 million people, while the number of people living below the upper poverty line increased from 5 million to 18 million people.
In light of these negative developments, the Damascus government has approved a 2015 budget amounting to 1.55 billion Syrian pounds ($9 billion), with an increase of 164 billion pounds ($868 million) compared to the 2014 budget. The 2015 budget was described as “the largest public budget” in Syrian history.
It is a high figure in Syrian pounds, but a very small figure when calculating the deterioration of the exchange rate, which was caused by the big losses in the various economic sectors, because of the devastation and the decline in tourism and oil revenue.
In the 2010 budget, which preceded the outbreak of the revolution, the figure amounted to nearly 750 billion pounds, or $16.55 billion, based on an exchange rate of 45.5 pounds per dollar.
The financial deficit between revenues and expenditures reached about $3.9 billion, which is better than the estimated $5 billion deficit in the 2009 budget.
Even the 2011 budget, which was prepared in the year preceding the revolution, adopted the same exchange rate, and it amounted to $17.8 billion, an increase of nearly 8%.
