The authors review the impact of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a government initiative that allowed small businesses to apply for low-interest loans during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the PPP helped cover employment-related expenses and mitigated unemployment for some businesses, it remained inaccessible to others, they conclude.
The author explores consociational democracy as it has played out in Lebanon, and its possible use as a heuristic tool to rethink the relationship between communal groups, political organizations, and the state in the contemporary Middle East.
By Hamad H. Albloshi, Kuwait University
The organization of the Kuwaiti political system is conducive to the successive rise and fall of pluralistic social movements, writes the author.
This brief is the third of four resulting from a May 2018 workshop held in Kuwait by the Baker Institute in partnership with the Alsalam Center for Strategic and Developmental Studies. This work is part of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on “Building Pluralistic and Inclusive States Post-Arab Spring.”
