War and the collapse of the Syrian pound

Before the conflict began in 2011, the Syrian pound traded at about 47 to the US dollar, managed by the Central Bank of Syria. As the war cut oil output, destroyed industry and brought sanctions, the pound's official and market rates diverged and the currency fell steadily, reaching several hundred per dollar by 2013 and thousands by the early 2020s. The Lebanese banking crisis from 2019, which trapped Syrian deposits, and the US Caesar sanctions in 2020 intensified the fall, and inflation exceeded 100 percent in some years. The central bank repeatedly changed the official exchange rate and issued higher-denomination notes. GDP is estimated to have fallen by more than half over the first decade of the conflict, so the sharp declines in Syria's output and exchange-rate series are among the largest recorded in the dataset.