The female tourist experience in Egypt as an Islamic destination

In Islamic destinations female tourists face the added challenge of negotiating their way through male constructed local norms. This paper fills the gap in gender and tourism research with a focus on female tourists’ experiences in Egypt as an Islamic destination, outlining the diverse ways in which gender shapes and influences their experiences. A qualitative approach was taken to explore women’s coping strategies with the male sexualised gaze that they encountered during their holiday in Egypt, and sheds light on measures taken towards safeguarding themselves. Their experiences were highly influenced and often involuntarily altered by unwanted male attention and sexual harassment, as the women felt the need to fit into local female norms of behaviour in order to safeguard themselves.     

Beyond the Optimistic Curse: A New Multiscenario Approach to Debt Sustainability Assessment

While a careful and accurate debt sustainability assessment (DSA) is crucial for an efficient macroeconomic management, the most widely used framework introduced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) suffers from several drawbacks that render its results overoptimistic and misleading. In this article, we correct the methodology by demonstrating how policy makers can develop country-specific “intermediate” forecasts of the determinants of debt dynamics, in addition to coherent “optimistic” and “pessimistic” scenarios. Our application to the case of Egypt illustrates that the debt-to-GDP ratio could increase to more than 100 percent by 2015, in contrast with the 61 percent projected by the IMF in 2010.     

The influence of website quality dimensions on e-purchasing behaviour and e-loyalty: a comparative study of Egyptian travel agents and hotels

Websites have become a channel for tourism enterprises to market and sell their services online. These enterprises are committed to improving their online services to retain customers and improving their competitiveness. This study aims to measure the effect of website quality dimensions on customer purchasing behaviour, and how this behaviour affects customer electronic (e)-loyalty. It compares the perceptions of 275 customers of travel agencies and 355 hotels using structural equation modelling. Findings revealed that website quality dimensions significantly affect the customer purchasing behaviour. The study highlighted the dimensions with a negative effect to help managers improve their website quality.     

Firm productivity and agglomeration economies: evidence from Egyptian data

This paper attempts to shed the light on the nexus between firms’ productivity and economies of agglomeration in Egypt. Using a large dataset of firms in 342 firms’ four-digit activities in 27 regions (62,108 firms), we introduce three measures of agglomeration which are urbanization or firm diversification measured by the number of firms by governorate, localization and specialization measured by the average productivity by governorate and sector (generating externalities and knowledge spillovers) and finally competition measured by the number of firm operating in the same governorate and the same sector. We find strong evidence for the existence of agglomeration in Egypt after controlling for firm age, location, economic activity and legal status. In the Egyptian context, productivity spillovers gained from agglomeration measures outweighed the negative effects of competition implied by congestion. The latter is chiefly due to the lack of good infrastructure. When regressions are run by firm size, location and activity, our main findings show first that micro and small firms are more likely to benefit from localization and diversification compared to medium and large firms. Service firms benefit more from high level of diversification while manufacturing firms gain more benefits from knowledge spillovers and specialization in Egypt.     

Trade and access to finance of SMEs: is there a nexus?

Limited resources and barriers to entry are critically higher for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) than for large companies. One of the reasons explaining why the resources of SMEs are scarce is their limited access to financial services. This in turn reduces the likelihood of exporting. For this reason, using the census of SMEs done by the Central Bank of Egypt and the Egyptian Banking Institute, we try to examine the impact of access to finance on their export performance. We measure the latter by the extensive margin that means the probability of becoming an exporter and the probability of serving several markets. We found a significant and positive impact of dealing with banks and having banking facilities on the probability of exporting and that of exporting to more than one destination. Thus, wider and more efficient financial services are likely to increase the number of exporters and boost exports’ diversification.     

The value relevance of disclosure: Evidence from the emerging capital market of Egypt

This study examines the value of voluntary and mandatory disclosure in a market that applies International Accounting Standards (IAS) with limited penalties for non compliance. The lack of enforcement creates an element of choice in the level of mandatory disclosure by companies. Using panel-data analysis, our empirical results show that, after controlling for factors such as asset size and profitability, mandatory disclosure has a highly significant but negative relationship with firm value. This result, although puzzling from a traditional perspective, is consistent with the predictions of analytical accounting models, which emphasize the complex interplay of factors determining disclosure effects. Our results also show that voluntary disclosure has a positive but insignificant association with firm value. This lack of statistical significance supports the view that there is a complex interplay of different factors determining the relationship between disclosure and firm value.     

The extent of corporate governance disclosure and its determinants in a developing market: The case of Egypt

This paper assesses the extent of corporate governance voluntary disclosure and the impact of a comprehensive set of corporate governance (CG) attributes (board composition, board size, CEO duality, director ownership, blockholder ownership and the existence of audit committee) on the extent of corporate governance voluntary disclosure in Egypt. The measurement of disclosure is based on published data created from a checklist developed by the United Nations, which was gathered from a manual review of financial statements and websites of a sample of Egyptian companies listed on Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX). Although the levels of CG disclosure are found to be minimal, disclosure is high for items that are mandatory under the Egyptian Accounting Standards (EASs). The failure of companies to disclose such information clearly shows some ineffectiveness and inadequacy in the regulatory framework in Egypt. Moreover, the phenomenon of non-compliance may also be attributed to socio-economic factors in Egypt. Therefore, it is expected that Egyptian firms will take a long time to appraise the payback of increased CG disclosure. The findings indicate that that—ceteris paribus—the extent of CG disclosure is (1) lower for companies with duality in position and higher ownership concentration as measured by blockholder ownership; and (2) increases with the proportion of independent directors on the board and firm size. The results of the study support theoretical arguments that companies disclose corporate governance information in order to reduce information asymmetry and agency costs and to improve investor confidence in the reported accounting information. The empirical evidence from this study enhances the understanding of the corporate governance disclosure environment in Egypt as one of the emerging markets in the Middle East.     

Modeling capital structure decisions in a transition market: empirical analysis of firms in Egypt

It has been realized that none of the three basic theories of capital structure presents a complete answer to the actual determinants of corporate financing decisions. This study attempts to model the practice of capital structure decisions according to the basic premises of each theory of capital structure: trade-off theory, pecking-order theory and free cash flow theory. The methodology addresses modeling long-term and short-term debt financing decisions based on ten different statistical criteria using data from Egypt stock market. The empirical evidence indicates that four models of corporate financing are influenced by the trade-off theory relatively. The contributions of this paper are as follows. First, this study offers a more refined and comprehensive methodology for modeling firms’ capital structure decisions. Second, the results of this study compare to those of previous studies of other developing countries and thus add an element of external validity. Mohamed A. Ismail is currently working as a consultant for the Information and Decision Support Center (IDSC), the Egyptian Cabinet-Egypt. He would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the IDSC.