An OECD assessment of Egypt's business climate.

This independent review of Egypt’s higher education system focuses on areas in need of attention by policy makers and stakeholders, including governance; access; quality and effectiveness; research, development and innovation; and finance.

The Arab world’s second-largest economy, and its largest population, Egypt has endured more than three years of political and economic turbulence which have slowed its performance, but its long-term fundamentals remain strong. Egypt has been through a turbulent time, but still manages to churn out headline growth higher than the Eurozone. Still, an economy that was growing at a rate of 7% has given way to a more modest GDP expansion of 2.2% in the 2011/12 fiscal year, following the ousting of Mubarak, while foreign direct investment fell by two-thirds over the same period. The figures are likely to remain subdued in the near term but there have been some improvements in cyclical performance, particularly with the country’s capital markets, as 2012 saw Egypt’s exchange grow by 51% year-on-year. More importantly, the country still benefits from significant competitive advantages, including a strong trade profile, a large private sector, a sizable manufacturing base and favourable demographics.

Egypt’s history has been marked by a host of dynasties, empires, regimes and governments, and it remains a leading regional power today. Since 2011 a state of transition has become a more or less permanent feature of Egypt’s political scene. However, the political situation seemed to have stabilised in late 2014, particularly after Abdel Fattah El Sisi was sworn in as president. A parliamentary election is expected in the first half of 2015, under the new constitution.

This book purports to examine the international dimensions of the democratization process in Egypt in the post Cold War era; a theme which acquired significance at the academic and policy-oriented levels in light of the growing internationalization of reform arrangements in the Arab world in post 9/11 and the greater involvement of external powers in Arab politics following the Arab Spring uprisings. During the second half of the twentieth century, the mainstream scholarship presented the democratization process as the outcome of domestic conditions not significantly influenced by actors outside the nation-state. With the end of the Cold War, this perspective was challenged as a result of the third wave of democratization and the subsequent growth of the “good governance” discourse on the agenda of the international development establishment. The new perspective attached a more significant role to external factors in the democratization process than was originally conceptualized.

Beginning in Tunisia, and spreading to as many as seventeen Arab countries, the street protests of the 'Arab Spring' in 2011 empowered citizens and banished their fear of speaking out against governments. The Arab Spring belied Arab exceptionalism, widely assumed to be the natural state of stagnation in the Arab world amid global change and progress. The collapse in February 2011 of the regime in the region's most populous country, Egypt, led to key questions of why, how, and with what consequences did this occur? Inspired by the "contentious politics" school and Social Movement Theory, Arab Spring in Egypt addresses these issues, examining the reasons behind the collapse of Egypt's authoritarian regime; analyzing the group dynamics in Tahrir Square of various factions: labor, youth, Islamists, and women; describing economic and external issues and comparing Egypt's transition with that of Indonesia; and reflecting on the challenges of transition.