State capitalism in Egypt

After the world witnessed the failure of socialism in the last century and the failure of free market in several economic crises, governments, realising the inefficiency of socialism and the risk of a completely free market decided to rebrand the former to make it more efficient, control the latter, combine those two and rename it to “state capitalism”. The following bachelor’s thesis thus describes and analyses the existence of state capitalism in Egypt.State capitalism, as defined by Ian Bremmer, is a specific form of capitalism, but one in which the state behaves as a dominant economic player and uses the markets primarily to attain its political purposes. In comparison to a centrally planned economy, which was prevalent in the era of Muhammed Ali, state capitalism started showing signs in Egypt during the Nasser era. The presence of state capitalism in Egypt was demonstrated on the composition of the state apparatus, the dominance of the public sector and on the politics the state undertook during this period. The transition to state capitalism during the Nasser era was done in three intertwined phases. In the Sadat era however, state capitalism in Egypt started to change its form to represent a rather non-transparent one, in which a private-public sector symbiosis was created and gradually intensified throughout the Sadat and Mubarak era. A proof of the existence of this “new” type of state capitalism was achieved by presenting and analysing four extreme examples of private-public symbiosis. In the last part of the thesis, a shift away from state capitalism was demonstrated on the structural reforms occurring in Egypt since 2014.