IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/b/wbk/wbpubs/28047.html
   My bibliography  Save this book

Economic Growth in Egypt

Author

Listed:
  • Hazem El Beblawi

Abstract

The paper focuses its analysis on the last three decades of the twentieth century. The basic assumption is that Egypt's economic performance during this period was less than satisfactory compared with the most successful examples in the far East and elsewhere. The paper also assumes that Egypt's initial conditions at midcentury compared favorably with the winners in the development race at the end of the century. Egypt has achieved positive progress, no doubt, yet compared with the higher performers in Asia, and given its favorable good initial conditions, the record seems quite mediocre. By mid-twentieth century, Egypt's agriculture had almost reached its limits. Egypt, therefore, faced a new challenge: a need to transform itself into an industrial society. This objective was only partially achieved. The paper identifies three interrelated factors that helped hinder Egypt's accession to a new industrial society. The first factor is a strong state and a weak society. An authoritarian state that in its endeavor to preserve its prerogatives had to give up good governance practices and limit the creative initiative of the individuals. The second factor is a semi-rentier economy. The availability of windfall revenues not only reduced the pressure for change but also promoted a new rentier mentality that undermined the emergence of an industrial spirit. The third factor is an inadequate education system. This system failed to provide the proper skills and values required for the industrial society. These factors, moreover, are interdependent and reinforce each other.

Suggested Citation

  • Hazem El Beblawi, 2008. "Economic Growth in Egypt," World Bank Publications - Books, The World Bank Group, number 28047.
  • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbpubs:28047
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/28047/577140NWP0Box31UBLIC10gc1wp10141web.pdf?sequence=1
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mohamed Chaffai & Patrick Plane, 2017. "Firm Productivity, Technology and Export Status, What Can We Learn from Egyptian Industries?," Working Papers 1134, Economic Research Forum, revised 09 Jun 2017.
    2. W.J. Dorman, 2013. "Exclusion and Informality: The Praetorian Politics of Land Management in Cairo, Egypt," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(5), pages 1584-1610, September.
    3. Jamal Bouoiyour & Refk Selmi & Muhammad Shahbaz, 2014. "The Electricity Consumption in a Rentier State: Do Institutions Matter ?," Working papers of CATT hal-01880334, HAL.
    4. Dina M. Yousri & Christian Richter, 2018. "Sociological challenges for Egypt’s development: 1981–2013," International Economics and Economic Policy, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 727-742, October.
    5. José Fuinhas & António Marques & Alcino Couto, 2015. "Oil rents and economic growth in oil producing countries: evidence from a macro panel," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 257-279, November.
    6. Ahmed Galal & Hoda Selim, 2013. "The Elusive Quest for Economic Development in the Arab Countries," Middle East Development Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(1), pages 1350002-131, January.
    7. Magda Kandil & Nazire Nergiz Dincer, 2007. "A Comparative Analysis of Exchange Rate Fluctuations and Economic Activity: The Cases of Egypt and Turkey," Working Papers 722, Economic Research Forum, revised 01 Jan 2007.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbpubs:28047. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tal Ayalon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.