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Corresponding Author:
Giorgio Musso, Università di Genova, Scuola di Scienze Sociali, Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Genova, Italia

Egypt: The Political Economy of a Vicious Circle

Volume 68 - Issue 1, February 2015
(pp. 139-152)
JEL classification: F500, O530, P300
Keywords: Egypt, Transition economies, Foreign Direct Investments, Structural Adjustment, Rentier State

Abstract

The current article attempts to outline a medium-term political economy framework to interpret the recent revolutionary and counter-revolutionary waves in Egypt. The January 2011 revolution has, among its many determinants, deep socio-economic roots which must be traced back to the failure of the economic recipes proposed by Egypt’s leaders since 1952. All of Egypt’s presidents have skilfully exploited a particular form of economic rent, defined here as “geopolitical rent”, in order to avoid tackling the structural imbalances of the Egyptian economy. On the contrary, they have allowed for the enlargement and consolidation vested economic interests by different sectors of the state apparatus in symbiosis with a crony bourgeois class, while the population has been kept politically quiescent through populist policies of subsidization and mass public hiring. The unsustainability of this approach has come to the fore when a spiralling debt forced the country into a structural adjustment process, and the events of January 2011 must be red against this background. The recipe proposed by the current counter-revolutionary government of general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi doesn’t constitute a novelty, and the status quo it has restored is much more unstable than it seems.

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Institute for International Economics of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce

Institute for International Economics
of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce