CAIRO – It’s an axiom of economic policy: The future belongs to the efficient, in a relentlessly competitive global marketplace that bestows outsized rewards on those who manage to get just one step ahead of their rivals. Competitiveness requires policymakers to embrace efficiency-minded “rules of the road” that remove roadblocks, accelerate innovation, mobilize capital, liberate ideas, and speed goods to market.
That’s a universally accepted principle, right? I certainly thought so – until I hopped into a car in Egypt and began traveling on the country's highway system.
Granted, we’re not talking about a rational environment here: We’re talking about a near-anarchy of motorized chaos. Egypt’s every-man-for-himself roadways are notorious for their mayhem: So much so, that traffic accidents, automobile repairs and highway deaths reportedly reduce the country’s GDP by about 3 percent annually – an enormous drag on the competitiveness of a struggling economy that can ill afford any additional woes.
So perhaps I should have been prepared for the highway bedlam that I saw during a January mission to Cairo and Giza, and during my travels last week around a broad swath of the Nile Delta region. You haven’t fully experienced traffic-jam frustration until you’ve endured the anarchy of Egypt’s roadways, where every vehicle known to humanity – from the humble donkey-cart, to the most stylish limousine, to the most aggressive "tuk tuk" taxi, to the most overpacked multi-unit freighter – contends ruthlessly for every last centimeter of scarce road space.
Yet the mind boggles at one of Egypt’s self-inflicted impediments to mobility and efficiency: the ubiquitous use, on roadways large and small, of the speed bump – smack-dab in the middle of major highways, forcing free-flowing traffic to come to a screeching halt.
As a Bank staffer who often focuses on strengthening urban productivity – looking at economies through the lens of the Competitive Cities initiative, a World Bank project that analyzes the many factors that contribute to metropolitan-level dynamism and growth – I’ve come to see Egypt’s use of the speed bump, even on what should be top-speed superhighways, as a metaphor for the country’s deeply troubled competitive position.
Initially, I hesitated to write about the speed-bump factor – dreading that, as just an occasional visitor to Egypt, I might be overgeneralizing, based on my travels mostly on the Cairo region’s traffic-choked roads. But amid my most recent travels in additional regions, I continuously observed the same speed-bump phenomenon – around the Nile Delta city of Mansoura and then up toward Damietta, and around smaller towns like Talkha, Markaz Sherbin and Bilqas. The speed bump is clearly a widely used Egyptian traffic-management tool, inspiring wonderment and begging for analysis.
Mercilessly effective in forcing traffic to slow down, unmarked speed bumps are built into Egypt’s highways at unpredictable intervals. They require drivers to be ever-vigilant, for fear of bottoming-out their cars and ruining their transmissions. Just to clarify: Egypt's speed bumps are not like the modest, inches-high humps that decorously restrain drivers in suburban American cul-de-sacs: We’re talking about major-league obstructions in the roadway.
On otherwise modern superhighways around places like Sheikh Zayed City and 6 October City in the Giza governorate – where urban planners are creating modern cities in the once-empty desert, hoping to relieve some of the pressure on overcrowded Cairo – traffic must come from mile-a-minute cruising speed to a near-standstill when drivers spot each tall, unpainted speed bump. On the narrower north-south highway paralleling the Nile River, where passenger cars must already contend with heavy trucks trundling to and from Mediterranean ports, drivers’ wariness of stealthy speed bumps is an added factor slowing traffic to an exasperating crawl.
Why the speed bumps – along major traffic arteries, no less? As Egyptian friends explained to me, most Egyptian drivers routinely ignore any posted speed limit – and, it seems, just about every other attempt at traffic regulation. (“When we climb behind the wheel,” I was told, “we discover that there’s a little bit of a Pharoah within all of us.”) To force drivers to slow down, in a desperate effort to reduce accidents and highway fatalities, the system of unpredictable, unmarked speed bumps can achieve what even a battalion of traffic cops could never accomplish: enforce slower speeds.
Insidious by day and invisible at night, the speed bumps are a potentially ingenious traffic-control tool – yet their side effects can inflict a shattering impact even on cars with skillful drivers, as I learned repeatedly during my recent Cairo, Giza and Delta travels. Woe to any driver (like mine) who fails to anticipate a looming speed bump, even at moderate speed: The impact on a car’s suspension and transmission – and its passengers’ spines – can be shattering. On my Delta travels last week, we accidentally took the full-on impact of a speed bump near the town of Mit Ghamr – wrenching our car's front brakes out of alignment for the remainder of the week, and forcing us to wonder whether, in case of an emergency, the scraping-and-grinding brakes might fail.
Self-imposed speed bumps along the highways of commerce, it strikes me, are a useful metaphor for what ails so many economies. Societies sometimes resort to deliberate and self-limiting policy interventions to bring some rationality to human misbehavior in various civic pursuits – not just in regulating something as straightforward as traffic, but in restraining the most complex areas of the pell-mell modern economy. Since individuals cannot always be trusted to obey the agreed-upon speed limits within the social contract, societies resort to imposing quasi-irrational speed bumps on behavior – restraints that can, cumulatively, become a debilitating drain on fficiency.
We tolerate convoluted tax policies in order to socially redistribute wealth, trying to make up for the tendency toward ever-greater inequality that (as Prof. Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics has persuasively shown) is an inherent problem in modern-day capitalism. We condone a patchwork of narrowly targeted investment incentives, aiming for idealistic outcomes yet often merely rewarding rent-seeking oligopolies and political cronies. We sometimes enforce hair-splitting antitrust standards to limit the threat of monopolistic abuses, yet we allow corporate incumbents to dominate vast and important industries. We enact full-disclosure regulations and anti-insider-trading safeguards to prevent dishonest dealing in securities markets, yet we wink at split-second trading platforms that give decisive advantages to hair-trigger traders armed with privileged insights. We impose tariffs and quotas to protect uncompetitive local industries from more efficient international rivals, yet posturing free-market dogmatists claim (especially in the United States) that we'd never even think of adopting any sort of strategic "industrial policy."
Safeguards are vital, to be sure – but at what cost to efficiency and productivity? Such metaphorical speed bumps often succeed in slowing economic traffic, but they can also skew incentives, provoke resentful non-compliance and disrupt the “just in time” delivery of goods to market. Moreover, excessive restraints – especially those that reinforce the privileged status of entrenched incumbents – can interfere with the mobilization of capital for far-sighted investment, impede the liberation of ideas for innovation, and undernine confidence in markets' fairness.
In the relentless global economy – which champions efficient competitors and condemns low-productivity pursuits to oblivion – society’s speed bumps must be continually reconsidered and recalibrated. As nations’ competitiveness evolves, and as megacities’ economic landscapes adapt to new pressures from emerging rivals, policymakers must continually re-think whether yesterday’s improvisations can effectively deliver tomorrow’s solutions. Familiar social-welfare mechanisms can sometimes become outdated; longstanding tariff barriers can outlive their usefulness; anachronistic provisions in the tax code can become counterproductive; chronic dependence on subsidies can distort markets more than promote inclusion.
For policymakers and development practitioners, some of the speed bumps that society has imposed on our economic landscape cry out for reform; others may still be judged to be tolerable, despite the economic toll they inflict. That’s where public-spirited politics and good governance enter the picture. The political-economy challenge is to get the balance right, in a hyperspeed global marketplace that is ever-eager to exalt successful competitors and expunge economic laggards. Continuously adjusting those wise restraints that enhance social fairness, and recalibrating those tolerable tradeoffs that promote shared prosperity, is a continuing test of “the art of the possible.”
Coming back to the context of Egypt and its speed bumps, both literal and metaphorical: After my recent visits to Egypt, my hunch is that, just as Cairo’s motorists will have to continue to negotiate highway speed bumps long into the future, Egypt’s would-be job-creators and innovators will have to continue to confront their society’s built-in barriers – fiscal, regulatory, political, social and behavioral – that collectively impede the country’s economic performance.
Building city-focused competitiveness seems to be the most promising place to seek workable solutions to grand-scale economic challenges. For policymakers in Egypt, and in every country, strengthening competitiveness at the urban level may be the surest way to help make national economies more vibrant and productive. The world’s emerging megacities are destined to be the engines of the global economy, and the Competitive Cities approach – drawing on the rigorous logic of the Competitive Industries concept, a Bank practice that inspires much of its thinking – offers insights that can help policymakers analyze policies to optimize productivity. Focusing on urban-based competitiveness can offer us new perspectives on the socioeconomic speed bumps that are bound to pop up, rationally or irrationally, along the long road toward the destination that we're all aiming for: a world where we have, at last, eliminated extreme poverty and built shared prosperity.
In Egypt, ‘a Story Too Good to Fact-Check’:
On Election Day, the Spicy Shawarma that Struck Back
MANSOURA, Egypt – They’re probably still laughing about it back in the Dakahliya governorate – at the abstemious lobby bar (juice, coffee and tea only) at the Mansoura University Hotel, alongside the Nile River.
I certainly didn’t intend to create an international incident – not even a fleeting one, amid the here-today-gone-tomorrow local rumor mill. But briefly last week – on the first day of voting in Egypt’s presidential election, for which I served as an international election observer – a misadventure during my visit to the industrial city of Mansoura somehow managed to enliven the local conversation, and even momentarily to mobilize some of the local media apparatus.
The episode made for a good yarn among friends in Mansoura and Cairo. But it also illustrated the way that my former brethren in journalism – ah, the life of an ink-stained scribe! with nothing better to do on Election Day than to chase idle rumors, while waiting for the vote totals to come rolling in! – can jump to wild conclusions. In the news biz, they often call it “a story too good to fact-check” – yet some momentary misunderstandings might have been prevented, if only an editor had done some quick fact-checking before embellishing reality.
The facts are simple enough. It was my team's first day in the field as part of an international election-observation mission, monitoring the efficiency and fairness (or lack thereof) of the balloting in Egypt’s high-tension presidential contest. In Mansoura, I was part of a four-member team of American election-watchers, in parallel with (but separate from) a similar delegation of a dozen long-term observers from the European Union.
About 80 of us, in total, on the American-led team had deployed throughout Egypt under the auspices of Democracy International, on a mission funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, an arm of the U.S. State Department. Additional delegations from the European Union, the Arab League and the African Union – along with observer teams from many Egyptian NGOs – were also in the field to monitor polling stations throughout the country.
Wearing government-issued credentials, and donning jackets that prominently labeled us, in both Arabic and English, as “International Observers,” my team arrived in Mansoura – along with a translator and a driver – armed with little more than a list of the voting precincts in the province, a GPS-enabled iPad, and a basic analysis of the region’s historic voter-turnout patterns.
Observing the balloting process at voting stations in and around the dusty industrial city of about 500,000 would prove to be a wearisome task – especially in a heat wave that, even by the standards of a Saharan summertime, was stoking-up to be mighty intense. The night before the balloting began, our team had started by strategizing over late-night sandwiches and (in the absence of even the mild local Saqqara beer) ice-cold Cokes and Pepsis. In retrospect, I should have gotten my first warnings about my upcoming ordeal by the queasiness I quickly felt while gnawing on an undercooked and overspiced shawarma sandwich.
Mobilizing at dawn – after a night redolent of that ill-advised shawarma – I joined my team in monitoring the opening polling-station protocols at the Ibn Lukmen Preparatory School, designated as Polling Station 29 in downtown Mansoura. Throughout the judge’s and pollworkers’ meticulous pre-opening preparations, my churning stomach continued to signal that something was up. (Or soon would be.)
My deployment at Polling Station 29 turned out to be a brief one. Just as the first voters were filing in to begin the voting process – showing their identity cards, receiving their ballots, casting their votes, and having indelible ink slathered on their index fingers – my world, suddenly speckled by swirling orange dots, seemed to start spinning. I clung briefly to a doorknob for support – then steadied myself on a nearby desk. The next thing I recall, I was flat on the cold stone floor alongside the presiding judge’s rostrum, being slapped back to consciousness by my interpreter and my poll-watching partner.
Must’ve been a fainting spell from the heat, I reckoned. Led away into the corridor to sit down and rest, a few sips of cool water briefly seemed to help – until swallowing the water triggered the abrupt return of the previous night’s spicy shawarma, with the regrettable full-scale impact of food poisoning suddenly sullying the dignity of the jacket that prominently identified me, for all to see, as an “International Observer.”
At the strong suggestion of the kindly judge and the earnest security team, I accepted the thoughtful offer of a quick medical checkup to ensure that no serious health problem was occurring. Dispatching me in an ambulance that had been standing by as a precaution, just in case of any such Election Day problems, I was soon being checked out by the highly efficient emergency-room team at the Mansoura International Hospital. Their diagnosis was reassuring: The episode was just a transient, if vivid, case of food poisoning, leading to a sudden drop in blood pressure and thus a fainting spell – the revenge of the spicy shawarma. Their prescription was an easy one: to lie down for awhile at the hotel, to stay out of the hot sun for the rest of the day, and to slowly sip on some soothing tea flavored with licorice-flavored anis.
End of story? So I thought, as I was placidly sipping my tea back at the hotel.
Little did I realize that local journalists had been alerted to the curious incident at Polling Station 29, with eyewitnesses confirming that someone wearing an “International Observer” jacket had been hustled away in an ambulance, apparently bound for the hospital. In a city with a high-profile, long-term presence of many European Union observers – who far outnumbered the little-noticed, late-arriving team of Americans – it was readily assumed that an EU observer must be involved. And what could have happened? In the fevered mind of a deadline-driven journalist – I can imagine, having been a newspaperman myself long ago, how a plausible storyline can be pulled-together even in the absence of any facts – this could only mean one thing: An EU observer must have been the victim of an Election Day assailant, or group of assailants. Or so the local media assumed.
With the specious story circulating via local news agencies that an EU election-observer team had been attacked at a polling station – could it have been a plot by terrorists to disrupt the election process? – the local EU press officer soon reassured the media that all of the EU’s observers had been contacted, were accounted for, and were perfectly safe. In an effort to silence the rumor mill, the office of the regional governor reportedly issued a press statement reassuring residents of Dakahliya province that there was no unrest, no danger either to local civilians or to international observer teams, and no threat to the continued voting process. That, as far as I know, put a lid on the story.
As for myself – blissfully unaware that my brief illness was being portrayed as the result of a sudden Election Day attack on international election observers (all a concoction, of course, by journalists with too much time on their hands) – I enjoyed another soothing cup of tea in the hotel, before eventually rejoining my colleagues on the election-watching circuit.
The case of the sickening shawarma – reminiscent of the classic comedy “Scoop” by Evelyn Waugh, about the misadventures of an innocent rookie journalist mistakenly dispatched to an overseas danger zone – reminded me of a reality of our media-driven age. Alleged news or pseudo-news, or mere idle speculation for that matter, can move at the speed of electrons in an era when everyone with a smartphone might fancy himself an investigative reporter; when everyone with a flip-phone camera might supply video footage to a television network; and when anyone with the desire to sell papers might propel fabrications that can inflame international frictions. Publishing first and asking questions later is always a temptation in journalism, and a little editorial self-restraint is thus always in order.
Yes, amid the daily flow of news, the tall tale of The Spicy Shawarma That Struck Back proved to be “a story too good to fact-check.” The report from Polling Station 29 made for quite a yarn that evening, provoking some jovial laughter among the EU and American election observers back at the hotel bar.
But, you’re now asking me, what if the local journalists had called me, after all, to doublecheck the details? I surely would’ve given them the straight scoop: Don’t believe everything you hear along the rumor mill. Don’t fret about the resilience of the intrepid international election-observation teams. Try some soothing tea if ever you have an upset stomach. And, if ever you happen to be visiting the pleasant provincial town of Mansoura, you’d be well-advised to steer clear of the spicy shawarma.
Disclosure and disclaimer: I traveled to Egypt on my own time, in my capacity as a private citizen and a U.S. national. My activities were completely separate from and unrelated to my role as a World Bank Group employee. No World Bank Group funds whatsoever were spent in any aspect of my travel or activity. While in Egypt, I acted solely as a member of an independent, nonpartisan group that had been invited by and credentialed by the Egyptian government to observe the country’s election process.