Stabilization and Adjustment in Egypt

2001

Industrial policy in the Middle East …, 2008

Supplemental MaterialComments (0) Abstract Inline_ca_web_1 Hafeez Jamali, "Ludwig von Mieses." October 19, 2012. For anthropologists, the term neoliberal often becomes a shorthand for indicating all that is wrong with the present. But such usage of the term can foreclose our ability to imagine different futures. In this article, I go back to a time before neoliberalism, when economists and philosophers were engaged in debates about the rationality of economic planning within market economies, and in which the concept of “tacit knowledge” was pivotal. These 1920s and 1930s thinkers, especially Hayek and von Mises, were convinced that collectivism and planning would not work, and their work is cited still today as having established the basis for laissez-faire (neoliberal) capitalism. I critically juxtapose their findings with a historical analysis of the public sector in Egypt, with a short excursis into management theory (and research on tacit knowledge), and with my own ethnography. Looking at the case of a successful public sector banker I worked with in Cairo, I show how he relied on tacit knowledge as a collective inheritance that was embodied in collective subjects and “secrets of the trade.” My findings thus call into question Hayek's argument about the irrationality of collectivism and economic planning. They also point to the importance of tacit knowledge practices as collective and public goods in our economic imaginary of the future.

2009

Clarity Press, 2011

Journal of Applied Econometrics

We study the impact of policy and institutional constraints, and reforms undertaken to remedy them, on relative price efficiency and cost of the private manufacturing sector of Egypt. We undertake this study using a generalized cost function, which subsumes the standard neoclassical cost function as a special case. This approach allows us to assess the impact of such constraints, which include labor market, energy and financial sector ones, on relative prices and the structure of production, including factor demands, shares and cost. Our findings indicate the presence of substantial distortions in relative prices, and hence on cost, due to the policy environment. We also find improvements in relative price efficiency and cost performance as a result of policy reforms initiated to remove the constraints. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Developmentalism and Beyond: Society and Politics in Egypt & Turkey, 1994

Durham al-Sabah Insights, 2020