Egypt Fishing for Investment

Doing Business is a World Bank publication that sheds light on how easy or difficult it is for a local entrepreneur to open and run a small to medium-size business when complying with relevant regulations.

This week witnessed the launch of the Arabic translation of economist Thomas Piketty’s successful book “Capital in the 21stCentury”.Piketty was kind enough to deliver a 30-minute talk outlining the key themes of his book and how they scale to a Middle Eastern context. We were privileged to attend and wished to share the key highlights with you.

Individuals on thepath to entrepreneurship are often faced with a world of challenges when starting their business. These challenges range from access to finance, red tape, lack of focus, difficulty in attracting talent, walking the thin line between growing the company size and growing its revenues, double hatting & multi-tasking, and finally managing the tight cash flow.

Recently the Acumen team has witnessed the social media uproar at the recent CBE decision to devalue the Egyptian pound. Most of the comments we read were negative, statements regarding loss of wealth were very popular as were accusations of either treason or stupidity with regard to the sequence of events. Hence, we find this a timely opportunity to explain to the non-economists the background behind the decision, the key principles and the inter-relations between the various governmental economic decisions. Finally, we will pose what we believe is the ideal policy package that needs to be adopted alongside the recent devaluation for it to yield the desired results.

The Ministry of Planning in Egypt has recently published the Egypt Vision 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy. We at Acumen Consulting have taken it upon ourselves to provide you with an in-depth read of the issued documents, summarizing the findings and highlighting noteworthyaspects in both the methodology and the results.

One of the economists’key indicators of business optimism is the foreign direct investment inflows into the country. The flavour of the month for 2015 has been M&As as global giants seeking to enter the Egyptian market acquired attractive & successful local players.

The economic outlook for 2015 is cautiously optimistic, with the GDP growth rate projected at 3.8% in 2014/15 in the wake of important ongoing reforms and anticipation of parliamentary elections, which is the final stage of the political roadmap.