The Impact of Political Instability on Egypt’s Exports:

Evidence from Firm-Level and Geo-Localized Data
Professor Chahir Zaki
Wednesday, 10 March 2021
Seminar

Egyptian foreign trade figures have deteriorated abruptly since the Arab Spring and terrorism events after 2011, which affected firms’ performance. Thus, using firm-level exports data at monthly levels merged with data on Arab Spring and terror events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) dataset (2005-2016), this paper examines the effect of political instability (measured by riots and terrorist events) on firm level performance to export. Our main findings show that the individual exports are negatively affected by different events. This effect is more pronounced for small firms followed by medium ones for both the quantities and the values of exports, though two to three times stronger for quantities.

Chahir Zaki is Associate Professor of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Cairo University, and Director of the Euro-Mediterrenean Network of Economic Studies (EMNES) in Egypt and Lead Economist at ERF (Cairo, Egypt). He is also a consultant for several international organizations including the World Bank, the International Labour Office and the International Trade Centre. He has published on international trade, trade policy, trade in services, applied economics and macroeconomic modelling.

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