Egypt's economy hopeful despite hardships, foreign loans

Egypt economy is still hopeful despite the country's policy to resort to foreign loans, particularly from the World Bank and the African Development Bank, as the loans reflect confidence of international and regional financial institutions in Egypt's future ability to pay back, said Egyptian economic experts.

Suffering over 11 percent of budget deficit in the outgoing 2014/2015 fiscal year, which Egypt aims to reduce by over two percent this year, the Egyptian government has recently approved getting a loan of three billion U.S. dollars from the World Bank and 1.5 billion from the African Development Bank, one-third of each loan is to be delivered by the end of this year.

"Foreign loaning is not desirable in general, but the foreign loans are softer when they come from financial institutions rather than foreign countries, and being approved such regional and international banks is a good indicator that Egypt's economy has positively passed their assessments," Amr Saleh, professor of political economy at Cairo-based Ain Shams University and former World Bank project officer, told Xinhua.