How Rich Are Egyptians?

Advice, information and discussion about Egypt in general.

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Hafiz
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How Rich Are Egyptians?

Post by Hafiz »

How rich are Egyptians?

A doco I saw a while ago on the poor performance of the Russian economy compared with India (not very favorable to Russia) got me thinking.

The standard measure to compare countries, and used by the UN/IMF/World Bank is to divide total national income/GDP by total population to give you an average income per head. Problem is that in some situations this gives a false impression.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t tell you much about the income of the average person. In addition in countries like Russia where 130 individuals control 30% of wealth concentrations of wealth, and of poverty, distort the overall average and give a false impression of income for the average person. Others say 111 persons control 19% in Russia.

So, on the standard measures, there is a difference between the average income and the income of the average person with the latter always being less – but how much less. Egypt is generally not embarrassed by the former but the latter is not often discussed.

No-one knows much about the concentration of wealth in Egypt but its probably more like what happens in most other authoritarian and centrally planned economies countries than in say democracies. If you want to steal from people democracies and rule of law aren’t the best way to go about it because countries where cleaner’s sons can be judges, prosecutors and MP’s get the rich really nervous. http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/son-g ... 1249138395

Oddly, the UN isn’t much interested in median income measures and the only data on this is available from Gallup which has done research on median incomes to get a clearer picture of the income of a real person in the middle of the population.

For Egypt, Gallup says that whilst the average, distorted by wealth concentration, isn’t so bad the median is not good. By median I mean that half the people earn more and half earn less. For Egypt its median is about the same as India and Laos, about half of Vietnam, less than half of Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria and about a third of China. Turkey and Lebanon are about 4 times higher and Iran about 5. That hell hole Sudan is slightly worse off, for the average person, than Egypt.

The point is that some are rich and this distorts that most are poor – like very poor in Egypt and that this has been the case for decades with no government activity to change it.

The methodology can be questioned but the figures give a partial insight into how poor the average Egyptian is and how well off the elite and how this distorts the UN figures which get so much attention
http://www.gallup.com/poll/166211/world ... e-000.aspx and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_in ... e-gallup-1

If you could work out where all the Egyptian growth in the decade before 2011 went it probably wouldn’t have been to the middle. Lucky for ‘some’ these figures are unavailable.

Credit Suisse has a partial answer on this as regards wealth per person between 2000 and 2016. During that time individual wealth per head for poorer countries like Honduras trebled, India nearly doubled, Indonesia quadrupled, Jordan nearly doubled, Morocco did double and Lebanon rose by 50%, Pakistan doubled. Egypt went backwards.

For those looking for excuses Iraq in the same period went through years of war to end up doubling wealth per head and Afghanistan quadrupled.

Of course there are methodological problems with these figures but the stark difference between Egypt and all countries in a similar or much worse situation is compelling. Seems the Egyptian system is just not delivering the goods.
http://publications.credit-suisse.com/t ... 254A3E24A5

After 70 years of military Junta by 4th class leaders why would you expect anything other that well concealed failure?

I find it amazing that the 'soft intellectual left' gets frenzied with moral indignation (something manufactured) about wealth concentration in the US - but never the UK or Cuba or Russia - but ignores that the greatest disparities by far are in the 3rd world - China in particular -. Sometimes you think their rants are about how they in London are not getting a fair share of the London pie. You never assume they are interested in poor people - London or Egypt.


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