Egypt: Between Warfare and Welfare
This chapter retraces the emergence of Egypfs social policy trajectory. A pri mary goal is to provide empirical evidence for a link between intra-elite conflict and social policies and spending. The author focuses specifically on the role of the ruler, Nasser, and his impact on early social policies. Highlighting Nasser’s numerous about-faces and ideological ambiguity in the early period of regime formation, he shows that ideology and the ruler’s personality played a minor role in shaping social policies. The chapter emphasizes in particular how external threats made high social spending financially impossible, albeit politically desirable. It demonstrates the specific types of ‘cheap social policies’ the regime utilized to deal with this dilemma. Finally, the chapter sets out to explain the persistence of social spending following divergence. It highlights the key mechanisms of path dependence using the examples of food and energy subsidies and the failed health care reform in the 2000s.