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Country Snapshot - Egypt  

HighlightsRankingsQuantitative DataLegislationAnalytical WorkProject Portfolio
  • Middle East & North Africa
  • Lower middle income
  • 84,474,427 (2011)
  • 2,340
Egypt Flag
Below are select highlights for the data included in the profile.

  1. Egypt’s overall Doing Business ranking improved this year, increasing by 5 points. Egypt has been actively reforming its business climate over the last few years, as reported by Doing Business. In 2011, Egypt made trading easier by introducing an electronic system for submitting export and import documents, which allows the country to jump 9 spots in the Trading Across Borders Indicator.
  2. Enterprise Surveys (2008) report that the top three constraints to doing business include Practices of the Informal Sector, Inadequately Educated Workforce, and Tax Rates. Thirty percent (30%) of firms in Egypt report competing with unregistered or informal firms, compared with 40% for the region and 53% for all countries surveyed. Of the companies surveyed in Egypt, 46% identify tax rates as a major constraint, compared to 44-45% regionally.
  3. Investing Across Borders reports that of the 5 countries covered by the Investing Across Sectors indicators in Middle East and North Africa, the Arab Republic of Egypt is one of the more open economies to foreign equity ownership. The country has opened up the majority of the sectors of its economy to foreign investors. Overt statutory ownership restrictions are imposed on 5 of the 33 sectors measured by the indicators.
  4. According to the World Bank Governance Indicators (2009), Egypt ranks low, at about the 15th percentile, in the Voice & Accountability indicator. Egypt ranks low in the Aggregate Indicator as well.
  5. The Index of Economic Freedom gave Egypt an economic freedom score is 59.1, making its economy the 96th freest out of 183 countries in the 2011 Index. Its overall score is virtually unchanged, with significant gains in investment freedom offset by worsened scores for government spending and monetary freedom. Egypt is ranked 11th out of 17 countries in the Middle East/North Africa region, and its overall score is just below the world and regional averages.

Subnational Doing Business Report

Doing Business in Egypt 2008 measures the ways in which government regulations enhance business activity or restrain it at the subnational level. The report studies 3 Doing Business topics—starting a business, dealing with licenses, and registering property—within 3 Egyptian cities—Alexandria, Assiut, and Cairo. These indicators cover areas of governorate (province) or district jurisdiction and practice.

The report found Egypt’s improving business climate was evident at the local level. It also found wide variations in the time and number of procedures required due to differences in local regulations and implementations of national law.

Main Findings

  • Throughout Egypt, builders faced bureaucracy in getting construction permits. In Assiut, construction permit-related activities require 19 procedures and 109 days; in Alexandria 30 procedures and 207 days; and in Cairo, 28 procedures and 249 days.
  • Local officials could learn from each other by adopting good regulations and practices that already exist elsewhere in the country. If Cairo were to adopt Assiut’s speedy property registration processes, for example, the time to register property would drop from 193 to 33 days, just slightly longer than Austria or Chile.
  • In the previous 2 years, doing business in Egypt has became more affordable, though the cost remained relatively high compared internationally.

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