Lonely as a pyramid, without tourists

摘要

Arecent cartoon in a Cairo daily shows Atef Ebeid, Egypt's prime minister, sitting up in bed sunken-eyed, hand clasped to his forehead. "I dreamed I was running Argentina," he gasps. Egypt is not Argentina. It is not ripe for popular revolt, and is not about to default on its relatively modest foreign debt. Like the sickly Latin giant, however, the Arab world's most populous nation is sliding haplessly into economic gloom. Touted in the mid-1990s as a Tiger on the Nile, Egypt now looks like a toothless crocodile. A combination of falling exchange rates, share prices and property values has more than halved the country's wealth in the past three years. Capital flight, plus vain efforts to prop up the currency, have reduced its net foreign assets by two-thirds. Unemployment, unofficially put at 20%, is surging as private firms slash payrolls, even as 800,000 job-seekers enter the fray every year.