CBE governor: Egypt led economic transformation, not just reform

CAIRO – 31 October 2017: The Egyptian economy has been transformed over the past year “not just reformed,” governor of the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) Tarek Amer said during a Tuesday conference organized by the Canada Egypt Business Council in Cairo.

Listing changes that have happened to the economy after the flotation, Amer said that Egypt spent around $600 billion over the past ten years. “We were spending and printing money without limits, we were taking huge loans and we had a loose fiscal policy… this should not have continued,” he said.



The result now is that Egypt has $80 billion of foreign currency inflows in 11 months. “This happened because we depended on ourselves,” he said.

Taking about the need for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, Amer said the $12 billion loan was crucial to bring investor confidence back. “Before endorsing the loan from the IMF side, I told the fund’s managing director that we need a three-year program, not just a one-year one… because we were ready to commit,” he said.

“Today, the economy is completely different.. even tourism rates improved as for example in August, we had $940 million in tourism revenues, compared to $220 million in August 2016,” Amer said, highlighting that if the rates kept moving forward with the same pace, Egypt’s economic reform program would be successful.



Amer said that he met foreign financial institutions and investors on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the IMF-World Bank in Washington two weeks ago, adding “everybody was saying that Egypt is top priority for investment.”