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Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt, by Amr Adly. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 336 pages. $90 cloth; $30 paper.
Reviewed by Mahmoud A. El-Gamal
Cleft Capitalism is an ambitious book that aims to make broad academic contributions far beyond its specific focus on the contemporary social and political economy of Egypt. First and foremost, however, it is a book about Egypt, written by one of the most insightful writers on the Egyptian economy over the past decade, Amr Adly. From this angle alone, the book provides fellow Egyptophiles a treasure trove of details of business history as well as valuable insights on various episodes and personalities in Egyptian political economy. In this regard, the book reminded me of two late writers, Galal Amin and Samer Soliman, who were equally insightful but are sadly no longer with us. The younger Soliman, who lost his battle with cancer in 2012 at the tragically young age of 44, was clearly a very strong influence on Adly. With the publication of this book, Adly has established himself as the undisputed heir to Amin and Soliman.
The central argument of this book is that the primary cause and symptom of Egypt's failure to match the economic success of countries such as South Korea is the perennial absence of a middle tier of small and medium enterprises. Such economic players would have bridged the gap between Egypt's large private and state enterprises, at the narrow peak of the economy, and the vast number of small-size subsistenceoriented enterprises, at the broad base, thus allowing the economy to succeed. This "missing middle" phenomenon is what Adly calls...