Item — HN Reader

State and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts.

Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.

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If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.

[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...

And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.

A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.

The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.

> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990

Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.

Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)

Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.

Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.

And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.

Yeah, Ottoman rule sucked.

Yugo wasn't doing so bad in 1990 before it imploded for other reasons (read: was "suicided")