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Hossam el-Hamalawy's Library tagged economy →  View Popular

11 Nov 09

Egypt's neoliberal reforms have benefited only a lucky few | Jack Shenker | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

  • Then 2004 brought a new cabinet which swiftly cut the top rate of tax from 42% to 20%, leaving multimillionaires paying exactly the same proportion of their income into government coffers as those on an annual salary of less than £500. Special economic zones were created, foreign investment reached dizzying heights ($13bn in 2008) and, in the past three years, economic growth has clocked in at a consistently high 7%. The minimum wage, incidentally, has remained fixed at less than £4 a month throughout. The global business community applauded Mubarak's rule as "bold", "impressive" and "prudent".
  • The conference was entitled "Just for you". Whom that "you" was wasn't specified, but it can't have been any of the 90% shut out of Cairo's miraculous economic boom. As the eminent Egyptian economics professor Galal Amin argues, "Those who continue to preach the trickle-down theory are likely to be the ones who do not really care whether anything trickles down at all."
13 Oct 09

Tough times for car sales

  • Sales through the end of August fell by 32 percent market-wide compared to the same period last year, according to AMIC figures. Passenger cars in a government taxi-upgrade program represented roughly 10 percent of sales volume, but when these are removed from the equation, sales are found to have fallen by almost 40 percent.
  • "Most manufacturers will shut down," Gazarin said. "The cost of assembling in Egypt is still high due to the small quantities produced."
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