Abla M. Abdel-Latif

The Politics of Investment and Growth in Egypt: Experimenting with a New Approach

‘Improve the investment climate!’ is the dominant advice for governments wishing to achieve substantial increases in productive private investment. However, national‐level investment‐climate approaches have been criticised for not paying adequate attention to context and feasibility. This article experiments with a new approach which focuses on sectors and on relationships between policy‐makers and investors, and shows how their common interest helped to overcome obstacles to investment and growth in Egypt. Such public‐private relationships can be abused but they have provided effective transitional arrangements for enhancing investment and inducing a new growth dynamic.

The Nonprice Determinants of Export Success or Failure: The Egyptian Ready-Made Garment Industry, 1975-1989

Abstract Using the subsector approach, this paper attempts to reveal the importance of nonprice factors in determining the success or failure of a less-developed country (LDC) to export its manufactured products. The case study analyzed is the Egyptian ready-made garment industry during 1975–1989 with specific interest in the woven garment industry. The study reveals several bottlenecks in the system which seriously impede the flow of exports and make the domestic market more appealing for producers than foreign markets, especially the very demanding Western markets. Three categories of nonprice factors have been identified: factors that indirectly affect the final price of the exported garments in the form of transactions costs; institutional factors relating to bureaucracy of export procedures and the lack of centralized services needed by exporter, and industrial organization factors relating to the structure of public sector companies and its negative impact on garment production and exports.