 phone. It is my great pleasure this evening to introduce our guest, Amr Adli. I present Amr in a second, just to say initially that this is part of the Sawa Smidley Institute Tuesday lecture series, and that I am myself a professor at Sawa's in the Department of Development Studies, which actually is the field in which the book that we are going to discuss this evening is very much rooted because our guest is Amr Adli, and Amr is assistant professor. I was asking him just before we start about the oddity of him being assistant professor with such a publication record, which is excellent. And he explained to me that the AUC has not been hiring any tenure track positions and so granting people fixed turn positions, which is also his case. We are familiar with this kind of precarization, I should say here in the UK, but still it is quite strange to see someone with this publication record not tenure. So he is based in the Department of Political Science at the American University in Cairo. He is speaking from Cairo actually. He worked as a researcher at the European University Institute. He also was a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where he focused on the kind of research that he will be presenting today. He also had a long postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford University, where he worked there with the Center of Democracy Development and the Rule of Law. And as I was saying, he is the author of well, a lot of interesting publications, including two books. One which came out in 2012, which is on the comparison, comparative of the development of Turkey and Egypt, called State Reform and Development in the Middle East, the cases of Turkey and Egypt. And the second, his most recent book of 2020, published by Stanford University Press, which he is going to present to us this evening, and which we're going to discuss, is a cleft capitalism, the social origins of failed market making in Egypt. It's a quite substantial, thick book, very interesting, I should say. And I wouldn't hesitate to read the book as a major contribution, not only to, I mean, the topic itself of the Egyptian development, Egypt's development and the economy, or even the regional setting in which this happened, which is the East and North Africa. But beyond that, this is really, and I think, a very important contribution to development studies, to the developmental discussion. And a book with original thesis, or thesis that is developed through the Egyptian case in a very interesting and very well researched manner. So a very dense book. Unsurprisingly, we will see that focus of the book is what Amr Adli calls the missing middle, referring to the atrophy of small and medium enterprises in a country like Egypt, and hence the notion of cleft capitalism between very small enterprises and large scale capitalism. It's not surprising because his previous study was about Turkey and Egypt. And in the comparison, I think it is one of the most salient issues is the difference in size between small and medium enterprises in Turkey, which are a very important component of the Turkish developmental history, and Egypt. So it's a very really interesting book and I advise everybody, and I know that there are a number of people from my department attending this because this information has been circulated. So I really advise everybody to read this book. And I'm sure that Amr will now present, presented in a way that will entice everyone to get the book and read. So Amr, very pleased to welcome you and the pros and cons. Just a reminder, sorry, before we start that questions and all that, for those who are here for the first time, the only way now to, because we are to interact with the, with us will be through the Q&A device on Zoom, I will be monitoring your questions and reading them, putting them to Amr in the Q&A period that will follow his speech. We'll be speaking for about 45 minutes or so, and the rest of the time until 7 p.m. will be for the Q&A. So Amr, sorry, floor is yours. Not at all. Thank you. Thank you very much for this kind invite for the interest in the book. It's really like a pleasure and an honor to like present my book and to have this book talk at SOAS. So like thanks a lot also for the introduction and for the fact that you like received well the book. You are definitely one of the interlocutors within the book because the people want was one of the major contributions, especially in the aftermath of the Arab revolutions that invited rethinking of many of the, well, what we took as tenets for the explanation of like the what, what came to be seen as a failed market making process in many of the Arab countries that adopted some neoliberal reforms. So Capitalism is a book that I started working on back in in 2013 when I was spending some time as a postdoc fellow in Stanford took almost seven years and it was based to a great extent on some exceptional fieldwork. And it's not, I'm not saying that it's exceptional because of its quality. I'm saying it's exceptional because the fact that it happened, the idea that these were like moments when fieldwork could be done to an extent in a country like Egypt. Tunisia was also included in the earlier study. And this was like a rare window of opportunity that unfortunately closed like all together. Nowadays, it's almost impossible even to have personal interviews unless you are talking to people that you completely trust and that trust you so that they can exchange any important information with you. And this provided some wealth of empirics about what I call the broader base of the Egyptian private sector without trying to conflate it with the like the other subsistence driven establishments, people that are self employed, etc. As many neoliberal scholars would like to like counting everybody as an entrepreneur. Like this is one of the of the things that I tried to be like careful not to do. And what I tried to do was to take a look at well, other cases in the global south, especially in Asia. And of course, it's a single case study. However, it's based on some very heavy implicit comparison with cases in Southeast Asia, as well as in East Asia. Together, of course, with the reference to countries like Turkey in the Middle East. And the question that is raised in the book is primarily, how did we end up here? Like a country like Egypt is a country that started some market reforms early on, like the earliest round with these reforms can be traced back to the infitech under Sedat in the mid 1970s. But as of the early 1990s, some consistent yet gradual and not very even, but consistent liberalization deregulation and privatization took place. Whether this resulted, of course, in the establishment of like a free market or not is quite debatable. And I think that we already have a thick literature on how the liberalization and privatization drives in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa ended up creating nonmarket forms of capitalism or what we might call in like using man's like language closed order systems to an extent there is already thick literature with very strong evidence. And this is not exactly what I was like trying to contradict showing that they were like wrong in getting the facts. But what I was trying to show here is that regardless of how free that market is, because this is quite tricky, assuming that we have as a matter of fact, free markets, which are completely competitive, etc., which is rarely the case anywhere in the world, or that we have cases where like big business is not intimately tied to the state, which is again, like pretty much of a like a like a chimera really, if you take a look at many of the cases that are deemed successful in Southeast Asia or in East Asia. So the question really becomes, why did the transformation in Egypt that took place led to a like what seemed to be like a failed market order to a great extent, one that did not deliver for the majority of the of the people, one that did not succeed. As a matter of fact, and ironically, in the very terms that were set by the neoliberal responses, in terms of upgrading the export structure, increasing the competitiveness of the Egyptian economy, generating high growth rates in a sustainable manner, like all of these goals were missed to a great extent. And to the right, of course, the blame was mainly on either that not enough neoliberal reforms were like adopted. And I tried to show empirically that even using something like the heritage fund, which is like quite conservative, the Egyptian economy, as a matter of fact, was relatively liberalized compared to many other cases in the global south. And we had by the 1990s, a private sector dominated economy with a very diversified private sector that occupied some significant sectors, some of them tradeable, some of them non tradeable. But as a matter of fact, the public sector seems to be very important in key sectors like the manufacturing or like construction, not to mention agriculture, etc. tourism as well. These became almost completely dominated by the private sector. Yet, the overall performance proved not to be very impressive, neither economically nor socially, of course, in a way that might indicate to us why the like Egypt was part of the Arab revolution. The idea that like a significant majority of the people were like found themselves outside of that order, either through unemployment or under employment, which is even more of a of a general problem that is linked to rampant informality, like problems of low wages, low productivity, etc. So what I tried to do is to shift the focus somehow away from state policies, state regulations, and state role in shaping the like what was well, like hoped for as a liberal order through these rounds of privatization and liberalization into the Egyptian private sector itself using some tools of economic sociology. And as a matter of fact, this was like one of the wishes of the late Samar Suleyman, who I consider as like my my my friend and my mentor, who like unfortunately passed like seven years ago or more, eight years ago, as a matter of fact. And Samar has this very main country, like very important contribution to the study of the political economy of Egypt, the the autumn of dictatorship, which appeared in 2011, like almost immediately before his his death. And one one of like on his research agenda was the interest in studying the Egyptian sector itself, because it has been overlooked to a great extent. And the study of big businesses in Egypt, either as part of studying crony capitalism or rent seeking or clientelism and patronage, etc. passed through studying the role of the state in shaping big businesses or in constraining competition by creating its own cronies or select some businesses, etc. So that shift into studying the vast Egyptian private sector, very barely defined as those who own the means of productions that happen to be operating on very different scales in very different sectors, requires some shift away from the state without ignoring the state, of course, and that's why the book was really an attempt at bringing three bodies of literature. One of them is the one on economic sociology that is informed pretty much by the works of people like Carl Polanyi, and, of course, Granu Vetter and the whole literature about embeddedness about how social relations are related to the economy. The other body is political economy, which is which is something that we are more familiar with state institutions, how the state shapes access to like mainly capital. This is what I tried to focus on the rules that have been like either inherit from pre liberalization times, or created throughout the process, and that regulated through a set of formal informal and semi formal rules, the access of the like bigger base of the private sector to the two forms of capital, financial capital, as well as physical capital with a focus on land. And that's why we have a chapter on the banking sector being the most important component of the financial system in Egypt and access to land, which is again something that I tried to pull into the study of mainstream political economy in Egypt. And the main thesis here was that a private sector developed or a private sector driven economy did emerge in Egypt out of a number of like different factors withdrawal of the state, the dismantling of the welfare like arrangements that were centered around the public sector that were inherited from Nasser and that lingered sometime under under Mubarak together with of course, the like the demographics of the more people that were trying to like that ended up being pulled into the orbit of the market and a certain population, trying to use the rough data from the from Katmas, the state authority in Egypt since the mid 1980s, a certain percentage of these were entrepreneurial in the the variant sense, in the sense of being bent on producing for market exchange with an aim of like accumulating. And one of the important markers here is that these were not self employed people who are usually much closer to the proletariat because many of them are people that don't have access to the job market and they end up doing some self employed job that is usually either manual or menial until they find a better job where they are paid. But we have those who are employers even on a small scale. And I tried to focus in the in the survey, which is more of a qualitative survey that I had back in 2012 2013, in order to understand more of these people and to answer the question that was raised by the third body of literature that I tried to engage with, which is that on business and finance, which is quite technical, very much to the right, quite conservative, meaning that it doesn't really raise questions about the basis of what the economy is, etc. It just like takes the market as a given. But empirically, it's very, very rich and conceptually as well, like one of the that I tried to bring in is the business system, the rules that govern a certain area, and that regulate to a great extent how these enterprises or how these establishments more generally interact with one another. So this is like business to business interaction. And more importantly, deal with the state inspired or set regulations that determine to a great extent how they access capital. And the point here was not really the lack of entrepreneurialism, anecdotally, we have many, like, it's a very monetized economy to a great extent. And there have been major transformations, the idea that the bulk of of of Egyptians work for the private sector nowadays. And this has been the case for the past 20 years, more or less. And away of course, from the like the big share of those who are like where, like either pushed into the market or pulled by the market for subsistence or like the like, like, mainly self sustenance expectations, we do have what what I might call like a hidden entrepreneurial population of people that start small. And the problem is that they remain so. So we have this literature in finance, especially, and which is like very business oriented about the support of SMEs in Egypt. And then you discover statistically that the problem is that we don't actually have any sector to start with. The problem is not that SMEs don't have access to education or to skills or to capital. The problem is that we have like the missing middle syndrome is something that was found in the in the finance like studies and that was brought into the study or explaining the Arab world more generally Egypt included. The idea that you have a very broad base of micro establishments that never grow. The problem is that they start tiny and they remain tiny. They never grow into what we might call based on the very, very different definitions, either turnover or labor based into small and medium sized enterprises. And an interesting thing when we contrast not only Egypt, by the way, but the other countries in the in North Africa and the Middle East that have gone through some extended market making efforts like Tunisia and Morocco. It's quite striking that you do have a middle missing like a missing middle to a great extent. Really it's like the idea that you have these micro enterprises. And on the top of these you have very large enterprises that have almost nothing to do with them. You don't have any backward or forward linkages. And in that sense, they are not being like the main sector that creates employment is that of the micro enterprises that happen to be of low wage, low productivity, low technology because they are extremely under capitalized. And the point is that this makes them very unlike not tempting to the bigger businesses to exploit them in the Marxian as well as the neoclassical economic sense just like to make use of them. And hence this might might be an explanation for the macro economic feature of the inability to develop labor intensive industries and the remaining like reliance on rather either capital intensive and usually very raw material like it's a factor based economy at the end of the day. The idea of the inability to diversify away from raw materials, even though a country like Egypt is not rich in raw materials, by the way, that's the elephant in the room. So it's a country that is not rich in oil, for instance, or natural gas, yet is quite dependent on them. And it's like mode of insertion into the global economy. So the point here is that I tried to seek institutionalist explanation to rather structural problem, the idea that you have a private sector that is like bifurcated to a great extent when it comes to size, with a very small presence of small and mediumized enterprises that had major implications for the inability to develop labor intensive industries, and also the establishment of an integral what I call like an integrated capitalist order, where you have enterprises that like have dense links with each other that form like national value chains or are part of regional and global value chains. This is something that is missing throughout most of the Middle East and North Africa. The idea that you have very few businesses, usually the ones that are quite concentrated, many of which are politically connected. But what I tried to show here is that you actually have some kind of a division of labor between the big businesses, many of which are politically connected, either as like the accumulated capital and then became politically connected or vice versa. But there is a division of labor, meaning that it's like I found evidence that it's not that they are necessarily crowding out the smaller ones. The point is that the smaller ones are not invited in. And here comes the political, like they are neither capable of or they could not bring like they could not break into the system where capital provision like was regulated, nor were they brought in by some of the powerful actors in the different phases of like market making reforms in Egypt. And this resulted in this institutional condition that I called a left capitalism, and like the main mechanism that I am like I argued for and tried to provide some empirical evidence in support of on the macro as well as the micro levels is that access to capital for the broad base of the private sector is extremely restrained. It's not by political time. I don't think that it was a political decision that was made in order to exclude the broad base, because as a matter of fact, on different occasions, you have at least the rhetoric, like showing some interest in the development of an SME sector, even in the political logic behind it as part of the market populism, if you may, core part of the neoliberal ideal for development, that everybody can be integrated on market basis as producers. So you have households that become household enterprises, you have individuals that become self employed or whatever. The problem is that this was not achieved. And I like try to give like through process tracing, rather detailed account of how the banking sector, which is like the main channel, collecting, like savings and channeling investment, how the rules informal as well as formal, like governing it, how they evolved since the 1970s onward, and how different coalitions that were in like social coalitions that were supporting whoever was ruling Egypt at the time. And of course, like the bulk of this time was under Mubarak. The this coalition was not just centered around the big businesses that are either like cronies or non cronies, because there are some, there is some evidence that you had, like privatization of accumulation in a country like Egypt, and they can go through these before. And this is where I spot on that's a footnote. The like the problematic nature of trying to draw too much or too many lessons from the post communist world where there was no formal private sector at all at the moment when communism collapsed. And private sector was almost completely created through the transfer of state owned inter like assets into private hands. This was not exactly the case in Egypt, as well as in many other countries in the global south. And that's why there have always been private sources of accumulation. And that's why crony capitalism as as I propose in the this triforcated cleft system from an institutionalist angle only constituted one, albeit important business system. And then you had other big businesses that were related to the state in a different manner, together with the small stratum of those who could make it against the odds into the rank of medium, and some small enterprises. But then you had that what I called the validity capitalism, which is like that transliteration of like the broad base of these micro enterprises that describe the fact that many of them were market oriented. They could never politically like influence the rules in a way that could have enabled them to grow out of their micro status and hence become like small and missing medium and small capitalist stratum that existed in many other cases, especially in Asia. And I tried to show that to a great extent here, it's the question is really about the capitalist order and how integrated it is, countries that have an unintegrated capitalist order are likely to have these institutions that provide capital not only to the cronies, but more importantly, in the case of Egypt, at least I tried to show that it had to do with sustaining different components of the social coalition that was state dependent, the attempt at shifting it to a great extent from the state fiscal crisis, from higher inflation, from like the restructuring itself that happened, and especially the bulk of employment in the civil service in the bureaucracy rather than in the in state owned enterprise. And how this was quite crucial in making the state one of the biggest borrowers of the banking sector, in a way that like most probably unintentionally created very high barriers and the very non entrepreneurial banking system made it possible for the only the biggest, most concentrated and most or best connected big businesses to be able to get capital, financial capital. And the story with land is not very similar mechanisms, but very similar when it comes to the final outcome, because these were clearly cases where the state like dominated much of the space in Egypt, especially the desert that was like, like if Egypt is abundant in anything, it's really in space in the desert that can be used for non agricultural reasons. Yet the land has a very, very interesting story about how regulations created rather artificial scarcity, having to do with with many components of the state calling that changed over time, by the way, but the logic remained where like investing in this artificial scarcity, you have big businesses being brought in at a certain moment, but in none of these like moments throughout the attempted market making in Egypt, did any powerful member of the changing rule in coalition try to bring in like the mechanism of bringing in representatives of the broad base of the private sector. This happened. And in the meantime, they like the broader base of the private sector that like those who were operating under balady capitalism could never wield enough power to break into the system. And here I contrast it to a great extent with how varieties of capitalism evolve in China in Vietnam in Thailand in before that in Taiwan, as well as in Turkey, as you mentioned, where it like the provision of capital is what enables such a thing to happen. So if I may wrap up, and the like the theoretical hoped for contribution, mainly like revolved around three points actually, the first one was to depart to a great extent from the neoclassical institutionalist stance that claims that the distribution of property rights is the prerequisite for the creation of a market because the idea that you have institutions that are well developed is simply something that runs against the historical experience of how capitalism evolved and works by many economic historians show, including by the way, people that fall into the neoclassical institutionalist camp like Abner Griff, for instance, they show that you have either functional equivalence, or you have other like private order or elements of self regulation or self enforcement. And this is what we have been seeing in many of the cases that are deemed successful in Asia, where you ironically have institutional qualities that are either equal to those of the Middle East, or are inferior actually to them levels of corruption, same goals. So it's the departure from what we might call like the neoclassical like the fun hike assertion that the state has to uphold the process of market making. Then we have the other thing that I tried to show empirically using the survey as well. What we might call like the Polanian basis for market making in many countries in the global south, the idea that different forms of embeddedness, social embeddedness can make market actors and they can create markets themselves. And this is a process that usually is not happening in the absence of the state. It creates this like vast gray area. And I tried to show this in the last two chapters, which have all of the empirics, where how informality and formality did not exist as Poles as a matter of fact, but rather as a vast gray area in which most of the small and me and micro enterprises operated in Egypt. So this is like another theoretical like point to draw, which is what I called market oriented embeddedness where embeddedness can actually instead of displacing the market can help in the creation and the sustaining of the of the market, especially in the absence of formal contract enforcement and strong property rights protection. The third theoretical point is that the problem might not be really barbarian with the development of like a functioning market system. It's not that you need like a spirit of capitalism or the logic of market making it like this. This does this. And like, we don't need to go back into the reinvention of the of the of the like the protestant ethic in order for this to happen again, it already happened and it found its way in by virtue of the integration of many of these parts into global or into European capitalism 200 years like starting 200 years ago. At the same time, the problem might be very much Marxian about how market making requires making first market actors and this market like market actors can emerge through elements of what might what might be called the primitive accumulations like the political mechanisms that allow the capitalization of actors. And the problem is that the capitalization, which is politically driven and has been so in many cases in the global south, including the ones that succeeded. The problem is that it was so narrowly based in the context of of of Egypt. And this had economic as well as political repercussions. Economically, it created this order of left capitalism, the missing middle on the one hand, and politically, it like militated against the creation of political and social constituencies that could have lent support to market making. This is one of the reasons why we can bring in much of the literature that was written, your book included the one or the first one on like the old one on the on the people one, as well as the neo-Grancian literature on the vision of the legitimacy and dominance of post independence states amid the attempt at the creation of a market order. So I'll stop here. Like, hopefully the presentation was comprehensive somehow. I, well, the book has love of details. I cannot like be just in presenting all of these, but like hopefully I can leave some time for the Q&A. So thanks here you go, Jürgen. Yes. Well, thank you very much, Amir. Well, actually, you left maybe more time than expected, or you took less time than expected, but that's because your exposure was so dense that I should have said to the audience fasten seed melts before we start. It was at such a rhythm. Well, I hope the participants that were able to follow you, it wasn't easy to follow you. I must say, even for someone like me who has read the book, so I may imagine that for others, it might have been more, more, more, more, more difficult. That was a very dense presentation and at a very high speed. So that, that, yeah. So what I'm sorry about that, I just got carried away with. No, no, I mean, that was great to see your, you know, I mean, it's obviously a topic that you control very well, you grasp very well. And it's, yeah, but I just said that maybe if you had spoken more slowly, people would have had, have it easier to follow what you are saying, because you said such a number of important things. And all this in quite, I mean, almost less than 30 minutes. So yeah, fantastic. Anyway, we will shift to the, to see what questions we have. And I will also put some questions to you, but the questions are starting to come, which is great. Let me start with a colleague of mine from the department, Subir Sina, who's was telling you, maybe you can read it at the same time, great talk. Thanks. So we are in the same issue of your forum, which, okay. And the question he is putting is what social groups in other comparative cases are the basis for the missing middle? And does this group exist in Egypt? Does it have political power in Egypt? Please elaborate. Yeah, so that shows you also that, yeah, you need, you needed to clarify a few things. So that's the Q&A is here for that. So please, maybe you start, I will take them one by one. Okay, sure. Thanks. Thanks, Subir. I do remember definitely that we work together on the special, on the special issue. Well, I tried to show that there were like the criteria that I tried to use very much was micro and small enterprises that employed workers, especially workers that were not like part of the same family and hence were related on wage basis. And I took this as a very rough proxy to, like this private sector, not being exactly within the realm of the firms that are driven by not firms, but like the establishments or the people that are usually self employed, they are quite informal, and that provide services and hence they are much closer to being self employed rather than being employers. So the like the point that I tried to show here was the groups within the broader population of micro establishments in Egypt that are around two or three million establishments according to the estimations of cap mass, and that had shown, well, like signs of their ability to grow in case they had access to capital. And as a matter of fact, I think that there were some attempts, of course, under the very brief Brotherhood like rule in Egypt, they appear to have been like interested in mimicking or emulating the experience in Turkey. But also before that, by the way, like under the market making attempt under like the team that was affiliated with Gamal Mubarak, they seem to have like targeted some of these. The problem is that the attempts at capitalization were non mainstream. And hence they were never on a scale that was like enough or adequate for the creation of this middle. So I do think that we do have a very broad private sector. Unlike other cases in the in the region where there is no there isn't a long tradition of like an what might call like an indigenous or an autochthonous private sector, we do have this private sector. And some of these enterprises in case of or establishments in case of they had access to physical as well as financial capital, they might develop into this mid that is missing somehow. So I hope that this is like what you like what you had in mind. Okay, thank you. And well, there are just three questions for now. So I'm taking first the question which are more directly related to your presentation. There is a one question which is on on a political issue, which we'll take later on. There is a question by Noor in the air saying you've been talking about restricted capital raise in Egypt, but in the stock market, you can now raise capital to an IPO is a company capital starting 100 K EGP. So how do you think is that restricting capital rates? So, so thanks thanks Noor for the question. The issue of course is that the stock market not just in Egypt, but more generally, is the place where you have, like by definition, big, big capital that is big enough in order to become bigger when you have an IPO with so the you have like to start with of course, Egypt is a bank based financial system until now the stock market has not become that central despite the fact that it has been around for like rather a long time. It's capitalization. It's overall share is quite limited to some of the biggest companies. And at the same time, the attempt at using the stock market in order to provide capital to some small and medium sized enterprises, like with the with the Nile stock market, it's like it did not prove really to be very successful until now. It's actually like a like a case of very, very limited success if not of complete failure. So the integration has to happen through the banking sector. And much of the attempts at include at extending capital to the broad base of the private sector has been happening through non mainstreaming. And I tried to show here that you have these either associations or capital companies that are well, like they are doing this because they are not part of the banking sector in Egypt, where the banking sector is not expected to deal with micro enterprises because they are not it's not worth it. It's like it's too costly and at the same time, like to risky, when it comes to dealing with the so many units that like happen to work usually informally with a substantial percentage of their work being in informal. And hence the main issue like will depend on the creation of what I called in the book intermediate institutions, ones that can enable the creation of complementarities between the social capital of many of these enterprises and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and the kind of financial capital that can be extended on impersonal basis and hence become available to many and this has not been like this has not been achieved under the past or during the past two decades under the different reforms that we have where we have business associations extending credit or something like the social fund for development. It requires some mainstreaming through like the reconfiguration of banking, but this is something that is not likely to happen out of like some technical or administrative reform. It's something that is clearly distributional and hence has to happen in political context where like the there is room for the capitalization of many of the micro actors in the market. Thank you, Amr. Now a question by someone who has read your book, so who has I presume been able to follow you and get to the core of what you are saying is that Briani Wolf who's working on a PhD thesis on again the comparison between Egypt and Turkey, which you worked on in your previous book. So Briani says, thank you, it seems that the development of the small scale enterprises was both a problem of their inability to politically raise their case, but also that the political elite didn't promote their interests. Is it the case that the political powers could not reach the SSE sector due to the administrative system or that they were not interested, as it seems that there were projects and attempts to integrate them like EU projects also landlords that gave SSE priority in Egypt? And well, there is a second question, but let's start with the first one. Sure. So, so thanks a lot. This is like this question is very, very relevant to understanding the situation in Egypt and the condition of left capitalism. I think that these many of the rules that controlled or regulated either formally or informally that access to capital were set originally to allow the top executive leadership access to much of this capital, either in the form of the desert land that is state controlled, or in the form of bank credit. And this like had to do with the earlier strategies that were adopted to stabilize the regime. And you need to of course bear in mind that the like early openings under Sedat and then later on under Mubarak were driven to a great extent by the designs of the of the of the regime to well like shield its constituencies as much as possible, at least not to like have like what what Samaritan once called at least to have passive opposition instead of like looking for active support. And the point here is that this created conditions where like the they never had the resources to a great extent in order to bring these people in. And the problem with the broad base of the private sector is that they were not part of the corporatization efforts that happened under Nasser to a great extent. And this is one of the reasons why they were not enabled, unlike many other actors to collectively organize and to be politically like relevant. And here it's important that the element of institutional heritage that marked how the state and society or state and economy were related here matters to a great extent. The project that were like supported by the USA as well as by the EU, especially during the last decade under Mubarak show that the like some of the economic, the top economic team that was drawn heavily from the ranks of the big business class, they could see the merits in establishing or in addressing the problem of the missing middle. That's clear. And that's why it's not about the intention. It's not about the fact that they missed this issue. It's rather about the like how the direct political like project to an extent aligned itself or not with the attempt at bringing these people in. So what happened is that the non means streaming in which was pretty much sponsored and financed by foreign donors wasn't like was was quite a representation of the inability as well as the unwillingness to change the rules according to which capitalization of enterprises happened in Egypt resulting in the exclusion of the small like small establishments from the like the capital providing arrangements in Egypt. Thank you. Just for everyone if I mean, you can come back with further questions if you need further clarification of any on any of the questions that you have put. So, Brian, the second question, which is also related to one which is by Marquetta El-Sheikh is about the military, which is of course here you can say the elephant in the room when it comes to the Egyptian economy. So, Brian asked what impact did the military economic holding have on the SSE sector? Did it crowd crowd it out? It's a very interesting question. And Marquetta El-Sheikh asked, similarly, could you explain the role of army in private sector and relationship with small and medium enterprises in Egypt? So the like the problem is that you definitely have the capitalist arrangement in Egypt being reconfigured. After 2013, especially like as of 2015 and 2016 with the military becoming quite central in the economy. I wouldn't say that the military dominates the economy as such. There is a very big debate, of course, where we have no idea about like how big it is, especially when it comes to the informal like military economy, which is made up of these networks of retired generals, etc. And that is part, nevertheless, of the like the privileges that are given to the different members, even though this finds an informal expression. But also the formal empire itself, like the work that people like Zinab ul-Megd, as well as Yazid Sayg have worked on extensively and tried to map empirically. However, this reconfiguration again, it's a marker of how the coalition dominating in or the dominant coalition has changed over time, yet recreated the very same dynamics where the state keeps the access to like its direct access to capital as a priority rather than the enabling of the broader base of the private sector to have access to capital. So what happened here, of course, is that the big businesses were reduced to an extent as the junior partners. You have the, as I was saying, like the military displacing partly the civilian bureaucracy, as well as the public, many public sector enterprises, by the way, because they were the ones that were really crowded out through the procurement and tender rules. But we are left with the same issue here is that we have different components of the big business sector at the very top. And not much is or has been done in order to enable the creation of like a small and medium sized enterprise sector. Of course, again, it's not that they intentionally discarded this as not important or that they moved against this. For instance, you had an unprecedented initiative that the central bank launched as of 2015 and that lasted for three years that had the aim of diversifying the portfolio of Egyptian banks into having like 20% of its loans extended to smaller medium sized enterprises. And like the study of this is quite interesting because of course, we don't have much like public information available. But it's one of these problems here that the issue is not really with financing SMEs. It's about the creation of an SME sector that is large enough so that it can then like we can address its problems with accessing capital technology etc. So this is one issue is that the main priority should be how to capitalize micro enterprises, enabling some of them to become small and medium sized rather than to address the small population of small and medium sized enterprises that we have. But more importantly is that it's again like the initiative has not been that successful even though many of the boxes were picked officially, because it's either that big businesses established these empty boxes of small enterprises so that they can access subsidized credit and then channel it back to the big ones, or as like a back channel, it's like a sort of tunneling to an extent, or the issue with the not having enough small and medium sized enterprises in the like in sectors like the manufacturing, most of them are in under capitalized sectors like trade or like services that were not only labor not labor intensive, but also quite import intensive by the way. And this itself proved to go against that the other goals, especially following the devaluation of suppressing imports so that the balance of payment can like get better. So I think that this wasn't like again, like a case in point of trying to like address the thing that we know best, regardless as like the bureaucracy, as well as the donors and the sponsors, etc. Like without taking a look at the things that we need to do that would require some institution building. And again, that like cannot be dealt with as a technical or an initiative issue. Thank you, Amar. Let me take the the the last questions we have from Cient and Ray. There was a previous question, but I'll leave it also to after the this one, the new one, which which is that the Arab revolution in our contemporary time enabled certain sections of Egyptian economy. And so what role did the West play in that revival? I think that this is a very important question. It is related to the point that we were just discussing about the reconfiguration of economic relations. And it definitely like that it enabled like certain non tradable sectors, especially like construction and real state together with a long queue of feeding industries, like bricks, cement, glass, etc. And this is again, like awfully familiar earlier rounds where the Egyptian economy was growing with a strong speculative element having to do with land on which these real estate units are established. And the problem, of course, is that even though this does create growth and some well, like low wage and usually like precarious employment, yet it it it's very problematic when it comes to addressing the long term problems that the Egyptian economy has come to suffer from, especially the ability to generate badly needed dollars, either by investing in sectors that can promote exports or investing in sectors that can limit imports for a country where imports are or have been double its exports. And here comes the problem is that these non tradables that do not contribute to the bettering of the balance of payment are like, they prove to be quite problematic because they consume the little savings, local savings or domestic savings that are available. They channel them into assets that do not become their dead assets to a great extent. They are not capital by any means. And the rounds in which the Egyptian economy has been has seen in the 70s and then in the 90s have been driven by the construction sector, of course, not on the scale that we are witnessing nowadays. And of course, this is something that is not only on the macro level, it also has to do with the remaking of the of the regime, because this is one of the elements where the military has become very central, like the military occupies through many, many different guises, very central positions in the infrastructure and construction boom that is that is or that has been going on. So I think that like, it's like, like the same story to a great extent, but with different protagonists somehow. But it's the same thing. And most probably we'll end up with the same situation where we have a liquidity issue because so much money was channeled into either assets that are very unproductive, or into product into projects that like create returns in the very long term or do not create returns at all, as well as not addressing the Achilles heel of the Egyptian economy, which is the like the current account and the like the ability to generate dollars without depending on volatile sources like tourism, or purely rentier ones like workers remittances that again depends on international prices, etc. And what role did the West play in that revival? I'm not sure about this because again, like what happened after 2011, which is not covered by the by the book, it's quite interesting because it marks a shift from the like the more dependence on the West as the source of money as the main trade partner, especially the EU even more than the US, even though the US is quite important given the geopolitical context. But and the rising role of the of the of the GCC of the Gulf countries that created a regional political economy, depending on the secondary redistribution of oil rents somehow. And this is very, very interesting. It's a story to tell. And I think that Adam Henei has touched extensively on on on this in his most recent work. So it's a it's a very interesting thing because there is a shift that we have been living through in the past decade. Thank you. A question from Safa Joudi was also preparing a PhD and working on the Egyptian Chinese Suez cooperation zone. So Safa is asking, given increased role of an openness to transnational capital in the current context, do you see opportunities for integration of the domestic sector? And is embeddedness with its exaggerated emphasis on the domestic level and neglect of extra local link? Is it a relevant lens for scholarly work in the present context? So thanks a lot, Safa, for this for like these two questions. Let me start with the with the first is that I'm not sure that well, if we mean by transnational capital, foreign direct investment, especially that you like, like Professor Ashkar was saying that you worked on the on the like Chinese investments in the Suez Canal zone. Actually, Egypt has been underperforming on the front of foreign direct investment compared to pre-2011 times, and especially under the like the last decade under Mubarak when there was a great increase in the ratio of foreign direct investment net inflows to GDP, as well as to total investment. And this gets us into like a situation where the almost two thirds, if not more than if not more of the foreign direct investment net inflows have gone to the traditional sectors, especially extractive industries like natural gas and oil. And these are by definition very capital intensive, very technology intensive. And by definition, they don't have really much to do with the rest of the economy. This is like, these are enclave sectors to a great extent. And hence, overall, I think that Egypt has been undergoing a redefinition of its mode of insertion into the global financial markets from dependent on foreign direct investment, rather than foreign debt under the last couple of decades under Mubarak to the reverse, where you have less foreign direct investment, especially in less in non oil and non gas sectors, and mainly tourism, the manufacturing and agriculture, and an accelerated increase in foreign borrowing, that by the way, depends on transnational capital, because there has been an increasing diversification away from bilateral and like multilateral debt into debt that is extended by private equity funds. And this is a different kind of exposure. It's a different kind of investment, of course, from the point of view of the creditor. But for the government, of course, it's debt. So I think that there has been this like redefinition of the mode of insertion, which is something that again, like, tells us that we need to be quite careful when we look at the rhetoric or even the goals or the strategies and how these things work out on the on the like or unfold on the ground. Your other question about embeddedness, I'm not sure that embeddedness has to be domestic, by the way, not at all, because you have some interesting literature on transnational networks of suppliers, that is by definition transnational, the literature on the Chinese or Indian diasporas, and how these modes of embeddedness enabled the transfer of capital of skills, as well as the movement of people of goods. So I think that embeddedness, again, like is an approach that is like inherently, of course, based on economic sociology. And I think that it was brought in in a context where globalization was working much better than it is nowadays. So it's not necessarily domestic. Of course, the study of Egypt makes it domestic because the vast majority of the producers in Egypt are not part of global original value chains. So the question becomes like having to do with the very nature of the case, questions of the national integration. Thank you. And well, we have one final question in those that are on the Q&A. Oh, no, there is again, a new one too. So that's great. From Yusra Hussein, thanks a lot for such an illuminating presentation. It was very helpful. I want to ask a question that is taking us a step back here. I want to ask Professor Amr on the audience he is targeting for his book for this book. If anything beyond academic circles, but also how he reads situates this book within the larger political economy literature that is becoming much more red. I see this in the translation in the region, perhaps reflecting on methodologically specifically. So general questions. And yes, Yusra wants to hear your remarks. Well, the part of the time that was taken in order to make the book appear in its current form was the push by the Stanford editor to try to target people that might be interested in the general question of development, or the political economy of the Middle East and Egypt, rather than necessarily academics. So this is like a policy that I came to appreciate later on, even though it required some considerable work. The book is remains very academic. But like it's written in a way that like hopefully was less dense and less complicated than my presentation sounded. So it's like mainly because I get I get it is it is very readable. The book is very readable. Yes, yes, that's that's thanks to them. Not thanks to me. Because most probably I write I add like most probably this is where they appear. I write like the way I speak. And not to mention that like English is not my mother tongue, which even like adds more, more complex to the issue. So the audience is definitely hoped to be like, well like beyond academia, especially that the the immediate context following the 2011 revolutions, and that was renewed somehow before the COVID crisis, did draw some interest in the questions of development and political economy beyond the like the jargony academic debate. However, however, there's a very big however here, because I had the intention from the very beginning of not translating the book into Arabic, as I did with my first book, but rather to rewrite it in Arabic, because a book on Egypt doesn't make sense for it not to appear in Arabic. But unfortunately, given the not very happy academic conditions in which we have been living in Egypt, I don't think it would be a very good idea to get it written in Arabic, not because it would be like deemed too risky. But the thing is that most probably nobody would would publish it as it is. So and this is a situation that is quite new, by the way, because like I've always lived in Egypt most of my life. And the thing is that like, we always thought that books that were like looked academic or sounded academic were spared. But even nowadays that you have everything circulating on the net, by the way, even that, like publishing houses have suffered a severe like a crackdown. And this is one of the reasons why I well, like, I think that the plan is only like postponed. I do wish to to rewrite it in Arabic. And in a way that would be like much more journalistic, based on academia. But I would like to try to write it in a way that would appeal to the audience in Egypt, that well, like, we do have some hundreds of thousands of people that became interested in public policy issues, especially after 2011. And we still have these people around. And they are interested in reading. So hopefully this can be done at a certain moment. Yeah, well, I very much hope that you will do so. I mean, actually, I was going to ask you about the Arabic translation. And you answer that question by answering Yusra Hussein's remarks. But what do you mean that you can't publish it? Because I've seen books coming out in Egypt, which are quite very critical, to say the least of the of Egyptian capitalism and the rest and the state. Well, in the in the in the past couple of years, publishers have become subject to greater censorship. So we got to write some things I got to contribute with some chapters. And we were told, like, bluntly, that there were some keywords that they looked for, and that we should take out. So we tended either to self censor, or to, like, say the same thing, but indirectly so that these keywords would not appear. But then it's like, the point is that there is a rising problem now. Like, I wrote a very, what I would say, like a very basic book, like that recently came out with with Columbia University Press with Nathan, with Nathan Brown. And he was very much interested in getting money to translate it, etc. And we couldn't find someone in. We only had a handful of people that might translate something of the sort or publish it. And they were telling us that it won't. And, like, to start, by the way, like, just like an anecdote, like Columbia University Press sent me the five copies. And they were withheld at the customs office. And then they sent me an email, like they sent me a letter saying that I have to go attend in person before a committee, where I need to tell them why I'm getting this book into Egypt. Oh, my God. And by the way, the book is a background book, like it's almost a textbook about Egyptian state society and economy. Like, there's nothing like. And that's the point is that they flag the name. And of course, I never went there. And then like, I asked them to like to send to like, well, Nathan was kind enough to get them in his suitcase to get to get me another five copies. And they still have the five copies in the customs. But that's the point is that they told me that the Arakaba al-Musammar Fatt is the one that is asking me to present. That's amazing. So it's very much a 1950s thing. Yeah, yeah, they have tightened it a lot, you know, because I was very, I wasn't the only one extremely astonished to see my book, Morbid Symptoms in Arabic, with the kind of color it has, being circulated in Egypt. Nobody understood. So maybe the sensor hasn't read it, probably. No, it's quite, it's quite uneven, by the way. It's very unsystematic, quite erratic. So sometimes it's like you are lucky, sometimes you are not. So it's just like this way. So Yeah, absolutely. I guess, probably you're absolutely right on this. Yeah. Okay, we have a few minutes for a final question, which was the first one, but which was a little bit out of the focus. Let me reformulate it. It's, I mean, how would you locate the Muslim Brotherhood within this economic structure that you describe? Well, I think that the the the crackdown that started on the on the economy of Islamist affiliated businesses, not just the MB, as well as the presence in non governmental organizations, charity, etc. might be a very like interesting moment for us to understand how the Islamists became part of the market making efforts in Egypt since the 1970s. And we have some very interesting stuff that is written, but much of it because of the like, very discrete nature, given, of course, the usually authoritarian context, it conceals much of the dynamics of how these different groups, despite state ambivalence to a great extent, and sometimes hostility could yet make their way in. In a way that is interesting that it works to a great extent against the assumed logic of chronic capitalism, where all like the basic assumption here is that you need to have the state as the source of capital of the big businesses or so you have many of these businesses that made their way, usually in not very capital intensive sector so that they are not expropriated in a very transnationalized manner, capitalizing on the fact that you have a transnational Islamist movement as some of like usually the case with like big ideological driven movements. So it's an interesting story that we might get to tell now about like what happened before where like these sectors where these people were over presented the areas in which they could expand. Also, like how related these activities were to the ideological like content of the of the movement, the convictions that like was it all in the religious sector was it all about commercializing religious practices or giving a religious character to otherwise commercial services or goods or there were other areas in which they just like operated. So I'm currently working on this using some of the like material that we have, which is well mainly mainly from state sources, but that we need to get with with a grain of salt. But unfortunately this is the only this is the only source that we that that we have, but they were definitely part and you like the recent book by Angela Joya is one where she dedicates a chapter on like the Islamist capital, especially the like what's what seemed to be an over representation of businessmen within the leadership of the of the of the brotherhood that what that definitely informed their ideological stance on the market as well as on the state. So there is a story there to tell by the way. And what I see as most interesting is that it again, it tells us about the importance of embeddedness. Like where like how these business affiliated or sorry, Islamist affiliated businessmen could make it using mechanisms that were not directly related to the state. If not even adversely related to the state. Okay, thank you very much, Amr. I mean, we had quite enough questions to fill fill the time, even though you gave us even more time. So that was actually useful in that regard. I would have liked to put a few questions to you myself, but I'll do that in a separate forum and maybe in different ways. Also, maybe should get into some written discussion, kind of forum, maybe a symposium around your book and on the Egyptian economy seen through your book. That would be I think a very useful thing. So we'll we'll we'll have further discussions you and me about about this. Definitely. Yes. So thank you very much indeed for for this for giving us this time and this very dense and very useful interesting presentation. It has been recorded. It will definitely be watched. I will myself be using it or recommend it to my students in my module on the development in the in MENA in the Middle East and North Africa. So that will be important, interesting input within that framework. So thank you again very much, Amr, and very best wishes and a good evening to all participants and many thanks to Aki who has been monitoring us on the technical level. So all the best. Thank you very much.