Following up on Ikram’s masterful 2018 book, Political Economy of Reform in Egypt, that analyzed why Egypt has for decades under-performed economically, he and co-editor Nassar have assembled a set of fourteen essays, two-thirds by Egyptians, on what Egyptians need to do to achieve inclusive prosperity and cushion the country against external shocks. Like Ikram’s 2018 volume, the essays here have the great strength of almost exclusive focus on what Egyptians need to do, rather than on blaming external actors or an unjust world economic order.
Furthermore, they analyze the deep problems and constraints facing Egypt without fixating on trendy bogeymen like climate change. For instance, Khaled AbuZeid’s chapter on water challenges is rich in detail about how water is used in Egypt and what can be done to improve it. Nor does he obsess about the poor water management practices of Nile River countries upstream from Egypt, a subject on which successive Egyptian governments have been near hysterical.
Nearly half of this volume is six essays about the human factor—demography, poverty, urbanization, street children, higher education, and water. Unlike most developing countries, Egypt’s population growth remains high. As the editors write, “The problem is not merely that Egypt’s population has been growing rapidly; its age structure and fertility characteristics are like to create a boost or ‘echo’ in the growth rate in the succeeding decades.” Add to this the constraints of 98 percent of the population living on 4 percent of the land: “Between 1947 and 2020 the cropped area increased by only 50 percent while the population increased by some 400 percent.” Agriculture, Egypt’s traditional strength, cannot create the 2.7 percent annual job growth needed to absorb the additions to the labor force. That means doubling the annual job growth from the 300,000 (mostly informal) jobs the World Bank reported were added each year from 2009 to 2019. That higher rate of job creation would require GDP growth of 6 to 7 percent a year, which is about 50 percent higher than the average over the last 60 years. The other chapters in this section analyze many of the factors holding back such a faster growth, including the shortcomings in the education system.
The other half of the volume is on development strategies, growth drivers, and policy instruments: trickle-down strategies, the digital economy, the “missing middle” between poor and rich, energy, foreign trade, fiscal and monetary policy, and a final chapter on institutional constraints. These chapters admirably offer a sober assessment of Egyptian government policy. For instance, Ahmed Farouk Ghoneim explains how a host of government policies—many of them “non-transparent,” in his polite phrase—had the result of promoting imports and discouraging exports, which held back growth and contributed to a large foreign debt. Noha El-Mikawy and Mohammed Mohieddin’s chapter on institutional constraints brings out how poorly Egypt does on governance, accountability, and the thoughtful enforcement of laws, much less freedoms of expression and organization.
The book is a model of how to analyze a country’s economic situation. It is rich in information and solid analysis, presented in a manner easily accessible by the general reader but well versed in economic theory. The authors do not blame external actors for Egypt’s problems, nor do they call for implausible actions by the international community. The picture they paint is realistic. Egypt does not by any means face a catastrophic future, but bold action is needed for the country to achieve its potential. To be sure, it would have been interesting to have had more on some politically charged topics like corruption and the pernicious effects of the army’s involvement in more and more economic areas. But that would have been a heavy lift for authors living in Egypt, where the government less and less tolerates open examination of these sensitive areas. Indeed, given the current Egyptian atmosphere, the authors are remarkably frank.
