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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Running after illusions
By Abdel-Azim Anis
The recent NDP conference on exports constituted the first clear admission of a fundamental weakness in the Egyptian economy: the gap between imports and exports. Egyptian imports this year stood at $17,5 billion, while exports were less than $4 billion according to one account and $5 billion according to another. (The Minister of Information admitted to the conference that the export figures furnished by government agencies were conflicting, and said he intended to discover the cause of the discrepancy.)
Should this enormous deficit in the Egyptian balance of trade persist, it will undermine all our hopes for national development. Already it has threatened the position of the Egyptian pound to the dollar as we have seen from the indicators of the past few months.
The conference on the stagnation of Egyptian exports was thus essential and timely. After long and fruitful discussions, the participants adopted several resolutions, which we hope will be put into effect with the earnestness and determination they merit. What particularly concerns me here, however, is the discussion that took place on the software industry and the enormous boost it could give Egyptian exports. Participants cited several examples of countries that have achieved an export boom through their exports in this field. The first cited, of course, was Israel, which is said to export $900 million a year of software. India, on the other hand, produces $1.5 billion worth of products related to the computer industry.
In spite of the importance of the software industry, I feel that certain considerations render it unrealistic as a means to boost Egyptian export trade. It will hardly serve our interests to rush after an illusion, only to run up against many obstacles later.
As a matter of principle, we cannot compare Israel's performance in the industry with ours. Israel is a piece of the West that has been implanted in our region for purposes which are not germane to this article. Suffice it to say that those who work in the software industry in Israel are of Western origin and training. Thanks to Western assistance, Israel also has several scientific research centres which support this industry. Not only is the quality of their work equal to that produced in the West, they also work in close coordination with their Western counterparts.
India, a multi-national subcontinent with a population of 900 million, has a large number of scientific academies whose standards of excellence are on a par with many European and American institutions, particularly in the field of mathematics and statistical sciences. Nor should we forget that, because of the many languages spoken in India, English has become its official lingua franca. The Indian software industry, thus, has been able to capitalise on the two-fold advantage of high-quality research and proficiency in the English language.
In addition, India began to put up the necessary infrastructure for this industry 20 years ago, at a cost of millions of dollars. As a result, it has been able to offer international software companies all the essentials, from air-conditioned laboratories to satellite communications networks. The success India has had in developing its "Electronics City" has attracted hundreds of international computer firms, which are quite naturally keen to avail themselves of the low wages they can pay. Some computer magnates in Germany have noted that the salary paid to one German worker in the industry can employ three Indian workers.
In Egypt, on the other hand, the standards of our universities have fallen into a regrettable decline, as has our educational system in general. University graduates also lack English language proficiency. There are many reasons for this unfortunate state of affairs. Among them is a severe shortage in funding, rising numbers of students, and an increase in the number of professors who contribute nothing worth mentioning to the field of education.
Another factor that should be taken into consideration did not exist when India first embarked on building the infrastructure for its computer industry: the collapse of the Soviet bloc, one of the consequences of which was to release into the international marketplace more than half a million computer scientists, all competing for employment on the international job market. Suddenly, in the '90s, the supply of software specialists has skyrocketed; naturally, they, too, take wages considerably lower than their American and European counterparts. Thus, the computer programmes of the German-owned AG firm are written in Riga, programmes for Debis are written in St Petersburg, and the German branch of IBM commissions its subsidiary branch in Minsk with its more labour-intensive tasks. The labour supply in the former Soviet Union is even cheaper than in India, computer industry chiefs in Germany have explained.
Thus, in addition to the disadvantages mentioned above, we would also do well to examine the potential demand for our products if we do, in fact, take on the heavy investment of constructing the infrastructure required. Besides the possibility that potential demand for our products will not offset the costs, software specialists have predicted that the advances being made in computer programming languages will ultimately enable the industry to dispense with much of its manpower. Soon, they say, one programmer will be able to perform tasks that require a hundred programmers today.
There is, however, one area in this field that seems worth exploring. That is computer programming in Arabic. Naturally, there would be a ready market and obvious use for such a service in the Arab world. It is difficult to estimate the potential of such an endeavour, but if we are serious in our intention to create an Arab economic bloc, we could at least form a specialised committee to examine the possibilities of developing the Arabic computer programming industry in Egypt.
