Syria's economy: half its size, a new pound and the oil back in state hands

How far the war shrank the economy

The World Bank's Syria Macro-Fiscal Assessment, released in July 2025, is the starting point for any figure, and the Bank itself warns that Syrian economic data are extremely scarce. It found that GDP in current dollars fell from $67.5 billion in 2011 to an estimated $21.4 billion in 2024, and that real output had contracted by more than half since 2010. The economy shrank by a further 1.5% in 2024.

Poverty followed the output. By the Bank's measure in July 2025, one Syrian in four lived in extreme poverty and two-thirds lived below the lower-middle-income poverty line. Gross national income per head of $830 in 2024 placed Syria well under the threshold the Bank uses for low-income countries.

The physical loss was counted separately. The Bank's Physical Damage and Reconstruction Assessment of October 2025 estimated direct damage to buildings and infrastructure from 2011 to 2024 at $108 billion, nearly a third of the country's pre-war capital stock. Infrastructure took 48% of the damage, $52 billion, against $33 billion for homes and $23 billion for other buildings, and the governorates of Aleppo, Rural Damascus and Homs were hit hardest.

Earlier counts point the same way. The UN put total economic damage at $143 billion by the end of 2013, the World Bank estimated in 2018 that about a third of the housing stock and half the health and education facilities had been destroyed, and it reckoned the GDP lost to the war from 2011 to 2016 at $226 billion, as the Wikipedia article on the economy records.

What the Baathist state owned and ran

Socialism became official economic policy in 1963. Britannica describes the result as a state that ran the oil refineries, the large power stations, the railways and much of manufacturing, controlled foreign exchange and regulated private business, while retail trade and small firms stayed in private hands. Steps toward privatisation after 1990 were modest. Small private banks were allowed from 2000, and the Damascus Securities Exchange opened for trading in 2009.

Before the war the gap between imports and exports was covered by tourism, transit trade, foreign aid and the earnings of Syrians working abroad, and Britannica records Lebanon as a principal buyer of Syrian goods. Wool, cotton and nylon textiles were the main manufactures, with mills in Aleppo, Damascus, Homs and Hama, alongside cement, glass, pharmaceuticals and batteries. Trade unions were obliged to organise under the Baath-controlled General Federation of Trade Unions.

How the economy rose and fell before the war

Growth came in waves tied to oil and to money from abroad. Wikipedia's article on the economy describes the 1970s as a boom, driven by the oil price rise of 1973 and 1974, remittances from Syrians working in the Gulf and Arab aid, and the 1980s as a slump: the oil price fell, a drought hit the harvest, remittances and aid dried up, and real GDP per head fell 22% between 1982 and 1989. Shortages of basic goods and routine power cuts followed in the late 1980s.

Reforms from 1990 brought growth back through the 1990s and 2000s while keeping the economy heavily regulated. GDP per head reached $4,058 in 2010. Debt fell from 152.09% of GDP in 2000 to 30.02% in 2010, helped by a Russian agreement of January 2005 that wrote off nearly 75% of what Syria owed Moscow, about $13 billion. Private banking was legalised in 2001 and four private banks opened in 2004. The same account links the liberalisation of the 2000s to rising inequality and visible corruption, which it lists among the grievances behind the protests of 2011.

Farming had been the second pillar. In 2009 it employed about 17% of the labour force and produced about 21% of GDP, and the state bought "strategic" crops such as wheat, barley and sugar beet through its marketing boards at fixed prices, often above world prices. Exports fell by two-thirds in the first year of the war, from $12 billion in 2010 to $4 billion in 2012.

Where the oil is and who has held it

Oil was found in commercial quantities in the north-east in 1956, in fields at Suwaydiyah, Qaratshuk and Rumaylan that continue the Iraqi fields of Mosul and Kirkuk. It became the chief export after 1974. Britannica records that output peaked in the mid-1990s and then declined. Wikipedia's article on the economy gives exports of roughly 150,000 barrels a day in 2008, production of 353,000 barrels a day as the war began in 2011, and 24,000 barrels a day by 2018. Natural gas was found at Jbessa in 1940, and Britannica records that the thermal power stations burn gas or oil.

For most of the war the fields lay outside Damascus's control. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces held the Deir ez-Zor fields, and the Arab Center in Washington estimates that oil sold on the black market brought the SDF about $1 billion a year, some three-quarters of its revenue. After the fighting of January 2026 the government took Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor and the Euphrates and Freedom dams. The World Bank recorded that in February 2026 the government's share of national oil production rose from around 20% to 88%.

What Syrian farms grow

Britannica counts agriculture as the work of about a quarter of the population, townspeople included. Wheat is the main food crop and its yield moves with the rain; cotton has been the main export crop. Barley, maize, millet, sugar beet and lentils are grown widely, olives, grapes and apples on the higher ground, citrus on the coast and high-grade tobacco around Latakia. Sheep, cattle, camels and poultry are the main livestock.

Most of it depends on the sky. Syria's Central Bureau of Statistics, cited by Karam Shaar Advisory, counted 74% of cultivated land as rain-fed in 2022. The drought of the 2024 to 2025 season cut the wheat harvest to an FAO estimate of 900,000 to 1.1 million tonnes, against a national need of nearly 4 million, and left a deficit of 2.73 million tonnes. The FAO launched an emergency and recovery plan for 2025 to 2027 seeking $286.7 million. The World Bank noted better rainfall in 2026. Syria: geography covers where the rain falls.

How the Captagon trade grew in the war years

Before December 2024 an illegal drug industry run by associates and relatives of Bashar al-Assad produced Captagon, the trade name for the amphetamine fenethylline. By the Wikipedia account, illegal drug exports had overtaken the country's legal exports by 2021, which led the New York Times to call Syria a narcostate, and they gave the government hard currency outside the reach of sanctions. When the United States repealed its Caesar Act sanctions in December 2025, Captagon traffickers were among those it kept under sanction.

How the Syrian pound lost two zeros

The pound traded at about 50 to the dollar before the war and at around 10,000 before the reform, a loss of more than 99% of its value, as The National reported in February 2026. Syrians carried banknotes in plastic bags to pay for ordinary goods, and in July 2025 the World Bank described a severe liquidity crisis caused by a shortage of physical notes.

The Central Bank of Syria published the rules for a new currency on 28 December 2025. One new pound replaces 100 old ones, the money supply stays the same, and the exchange began on 1 January 2026 for 90 days, free of charge at more than 1,000 outlets. The new notes dropped the portraits of the Assad family. By February 2026 the bank's governor told The National that about 35% of the 41 trillion old pounds in circulation had been replaced.

Prices settled at the same time. The World Bank estimates inflation at 11.5% in 2025, down from 72.1% in 2024, and records the pound as appreciating since December 2024.

Who is paying for reconstruction

The sanctions had been broad. Through the war years the Arab League, the European Union, the United States, Turkey, Canada, Japan and others restricted trade with Syria, and the US Caesar Act, in force from June 2020, reached foreign firms that dealt with the government. The European Union lifted its economic sanctions in May 2025.

The money came back in the order the sanctions came off. Saudi Arabia and Qatar cleared Syria's arrears to the World Bank's International Development Association in spring 2025, ending a suspension of 14 years. In June 2025 the Bank approved its first project in Syria in nearly four decades, a $146 million grant to restore electricity, followed by $225 million for water and health in April 2026 and $100 million for the financial sector in August 2026. The United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom eased their sanctions through 2025, and the US Caesar Act was repealed on 18 December 2025.

The Gulf states have led private and state investment. Human Rights Watch, reporting in September 2026, lists Saudi pledges of $6.4 billion across property, infrastructure, telecommunications and energy, a Qatari commitment of $4 billion, and a 30-year concession over the port of Tartus for the Emirati operator DP World. The transitional government published a national recovery blueprint in March 2026.

The same report raised the question of whose property gets rebuilt. Human Rights Watch found that the legal framework for reconstruction does not require developers or the state to consult the people affected, many of them still displaced, and that Decree 66 of 2012, used under the old government to clear neighbourhoods of Damascus for projects such as Marota City, had not been repealed. In Jobar, east of central Damascus, about 95% of buildings were destroyed according to The Syria Report.

Electricity was the first thing the Bank paid for because the grid was the first thing to fail. Britannica records that new thermal stations had largely ended shortages in the early 2000s and that Syria then sold power to Iraq and Lebanon; the hydroelectric plant at the Euphrates Dam, inaugurated in 1978, lost output to poor maintenance, upstream use in Turkey and erratic rain. An IMF technical team that visited Damascus in November 2025 reported signs of recovery and a lack of reliable data.

The World Bank's estimates of growth in 2025 range from 2% to 4%, with air and port traffic up and business registrations rising. It expects modest further growth in 2026 from returning refugees, higher public wages and more oil and gas.

How goods cross the country

Syria's ports, Latakia and Tartus, were both built after independence. Railways link Aleppo with Damascus, the Turkish border and the north-eastern line through Qamishli toward Iraq; another runs from Homs to Tartus and east to the phosphate mines near Tadmur, and the old Hejaz Railway runs from Damascus to Amman. International airports serve Damascus and Aleppo. Phosphate from the mines near Palmyra, limestone, basalt, rock salt, gypsum and asphalt are the main minerals worked.