CAIRO: Maged Othman, the president of the Information and Decision Support Center told Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper that the poor in Egypt are not getting poorer and he cited as evidence the increase in the percentage of refrigerators sold. In 1995 the percentage of Egyptians who owned a refrigerator was 56 percent; the figure reached 86 percent in 2005, Othman said. The statement came in a long interview conducted by the newspaper that appeared in the Sunday April 22 issue. Samir Radwan, managing director of the Economic Research Forum, told The Daily Star Egypt that the rate of absolute poverty has definitely decreased. However the income levels are still unfairly distributed, but this is a common feature of the transitional stages, Radwan said. Othman told Al-Masry Al-Youm that there is a difference between achieving progress in the country s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and how the progress is diffused in society and its effect on the population. Minister of Trade and Industry Rachid Mohamed Rachid stated at a press conference organized by the Egyptian-French Business Association at the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel two months ago that it is now the government s job to make the normal citizen feel the development. Some people already felt the effect but we have a huge population and it is a long journey to make 70 million citizens experience the difference, Rachid said. Rachid said that more effort should be put in so that the average Egyptian citizen can reap the fruits of the economic growth that Egypt has witnessed in the last three years. Rachid indicated that three years ago no one could have ever dreamt that we could increase our GDP from three to seven percent. According to Radwan there are two reasons for why the average Egyptian citizen is not feeling the economic progress that Egypt has witnessed in the past few years. The first reason, as Radwan stated, is due to the fact that the progress is very new. It has taken place in the last three years only, so it needs more time before it reaches everyone, Radwan said. The second reason, according to Radwan, is the unemployment rate that did not change. People neither feel that more people are getting employed nor that higher salaries are being paid, to feel the development, Radwan said. And then there is the role of the economic and social policies like taxes and how it should be fairly distributed among the citizens, Radwan added. The intermediate social strata, according to Othman, still exist. There might be businessmen who have big fortunes and big incomes compared to others. But this is the nature of a capitalist economy anywhere, Othman said. Rachid stressed in that regard that the "rich get more governmental subsidies on products because they purchase more products. This, he believed, was a situation that needed to be rectified. I know that it is hard to ask to reduce the number of civil servants or to decrease government subsidies, but we have to struggle to use our assets in the most effective way to enhance our path towards development, Rachid said.
