Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2013

Abstract

When the Euro Mediterranean Partnership Agreement (EMP) between Egypt and the European Union came into force, it was the first regional agreement of this kind to involve north-southsouth developing and developed countries. This type of regional agreements opened the door for many challenges facing the participating countries especially the developing ones. Therefore, this article is mainly concerned with a detailed assessment of the Egypt-Euro Mediterranean partnership Agreement through analyzing its objectives and instruments, providing an overview of the Egyptian EU economic relationship and the Egyptian economy's benchmark data and basic economic indicators before and after the EMP. This article also discusses the Egyptian trade structure before and after joining the EMP. From this analysis, we reach the conclusion that since the EMP entered into effect, intra and interregional trade and FDI flows have increased significantly for Egypt. However, Egypt's strong export growth and FDI inflows under EMP have not been translated into similarly strong economic and social progress. Indeed, the outcome of EMP has been disappointing with regard to key macroeconomic variables and social indicators. Since EMP came into effect, Egyptian GDP growth has been unstable. There is no evidence of accelerated change in the structure of production of the Egyptian economy since 1995; evidence shows that total employment has been the same since 1995, while the unemployment rate has been decreasing at a fairly low level.

Identifier

2334-282X

Journal Title

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

ISSN

2334-282X

Publisher

Middle East Economic Association and Loyola University Chicago

Volume

15

Comments

Presentation of the articles in the Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies was made possible by a limited license granted to Loyola University Chicago and Middle East Economics Association from the authors who have retained all copyrights in the articles. http://www.luc.edu/orgs/meea/volume15/meea15.htm

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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