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Faring Poorly and Ways Forward: Reforming Egypt’s Policies

October 11, 2016

Over the past few years, Egypt’s economic conditions have been deteriorating. The country’s rising inflation rate, in combination with several other factors, is putting severe pressure on the various strata of the population, particularly those living under the poverty line. This agony, which has continuously escalated since as early as the late 1970s, suggests that the underlying complications remain deeply engrained in the edifice of the Egyptian economy, taking the country from one crisis to another. The aim of this article is to put forward the longstanding circumstances that have culminated in the current crisis and puts forth the idea that the solution lies not in an economic strategy but rather in the reform of policies that have persisted for years. In the 1950s, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s idea of a “self-sufficient Egypt,” which he referred to in many of his speeches, led to policies such as subsidizing inefficient internal producers and tariffing imports to force them out of the Egyptian markets. Although the decision to adopt the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) doctrine instead of an Export-Oriented Industrialization system is more than half a century old, the policy remains in…


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