Dreamland: The Neoliberalism of Your Desires. Neoliberalism is a triumph of the political imagination.
Its achievement is double: While narrowing the window of political debate, it promises from this window a prospect without limits. On the one hand, it frames public discussion in the elliptic language of neoclassical economics. The collective well-being of the nation is depicted only in terms of how it is adjusted in gross to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets.
On the other, neglecting the actual concerns of any concrete local or collective community, neoliberalism encourages the most exuberant dreams of private accumulation -- and a chaotic reallocation of collective resources. In Egypt, such modes of thinking have defined the 1990s as a decade of remarkable success and a vindication of neoliberal principles.
The development tracts spreading out across the fields and deserts around Greater Cairo represent the most phenomenal real estate explosion Egypt has ever witnessed. Building Trade Undisciplined Capital. Neoliberal Egypt: The hijacked revolution. London, United Kingdom - The ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 set off a spate of political reforms in Egypt culminating in the recent parliamentary elections and the ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party.
Yet the meaning of the 2011 "revolution" remains far from decided. When Egyptians rose up last year, it was not only against tyranny and political repression, but also against the neoliberal economic order - designed by the United States - that has generated hunger, poverty and inequality in Egypt since the 1980s. For most people, these latter concerns were at least as pressing as the former, though they have been completely obscured in the prevailing media discourse. Now the tragedy is that, when it comes to economic policy, Egypt’s new rulers seem set to reproduce more of the same. The Brotherhood's new position on economic policy has delighted the United States. USAid and economic policy in Egypt Aid from the US always comes with strings attached. America's Egypt. Open almost any study of Egypt produced by an American or an international development agency and you are likely to find it starting with the same simple image.
The question of Egypt’s economic development is almost invariably introduced as a problem of geography versus demography, pictured by describing the narrow valley of the Nile River, surrounded by desert, crowded with rapidly multiplying millions of inhabitants. A 1980 World Bank report on Egypt provides a typical example. “The geographical and demographic characteristics of Egypt delineate its basic economic problem,” the book begins: Although the country contains about 386,000 square miles...only a narrow strip in the Nile Valley and its Delta is usable. This area of 15,000 square miles -- less than 4 percent of the land -- is but an elongated oasis in the midst of desert. Egypt depends upon the fruits of the narrow ribbon of cultivated land adjacent to the Nile and to that river’s rich fan-shaped delta.
The Performance of State-Owned Enterprises and Newly Privatized Firms: Does Privatization Really Matter? by Mohammed Omran. The Insurance Holding Company; Arab Academy for Science and TechnologyAugust 2003 FEEM Working Paper No. 73.2002 Abstract: While it is well documented that privatization leads to an improvement in the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) following divestiture, it is argued that many of these studies do not consider the performance of control firms of similar pre-privatization situations, i.e. the performance of SOEs.
By matching sample firms (privatized) to control firms (SOEs), we find that privatized firms do not exhibit significant improvement in their performance changes compared with SOEs, which might put into question the benefits of privatization in Egypt. Keyword: SOEs, Privatization, Middle East, and Egypt Number of Pages in PDF File: 39 JEL Classification: G32, L33 working papers series Suggested Citation Omran, Mohammed, The Performance of State-Owned Enterprises and Newly Privatized Firms: Does Privatization Really Matter? Egyptian Privatization.
Sadat's Infitah...