ABSTRACT
US bilateral aid to Egypt, including commodity and technology transfers, has probably been indispensable for meeting immediate resource needs and the infrastructural requirements of industry. High levels of assistance often seem to be inversely related to Egypt's ability to use the aid effectively or wisely. Modern sector private enterprise in Egypt has been more difficult to generate and the public sector more entrenched than many US advisors had supposed. Yet the basic structure of Egypt's economy in the mid-1980s is weak and hardly self-sustaining. The Egyptian government shares with most of the Third World difficulty in mobilizing and managing effectively its available domestic resources. The very size of the aid effort set it apart in the sense that whatever lessons were learned in Egypt would not necessarily be applicable to the sixty or so other countries receiving various forms of US economic assistance. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
