Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/173823 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-739
Publisher: 
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Washington, DC
Abstract: 
Using a large, original database of 385 politically connected firms under the Mubarak regime in Egypt, we document for the first time the negative impact of cronyism on economic growth. In the early 2000s, a policy shift in Egypt led to the expansion of crony activities into new, previously unconnected sectors. 4-digit sectors that experienced crony entry between 1996 and 2006 experienced lower aggregate employment growth during the period than those that did not. A wide array of supporting evidence indicates that this effect was causal, reflecting the mechanisms described in Aghion et al. (2001), and not due to selection. Crony entry skewed the distribution of employment toward smaller, less productive firms; crony firms did not enter into sectors that would have also grown more slowly even in the absence of crony entry; and they enjoyed multiple regulatory and fiscal privileges that reduced competition and investments by non-crony firms, including trade protection, energy subsidies, access to land, and favorable regulatory enforcement. Moreover, energy subsidies and trade protection account for the higher profits of politically connected firms.
Subjects: 
cronyism
growth
political connections
productivity
regulation
JEL: 
D72
D24
O47
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
892.74 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.