{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02295918367346939, 'fraction_numerical': 0.016156462585034014, 'mean_word_length': 5.017902813299233, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“The House the Boom Built”: The Informal Economy and Islamist Politics in Egypt

In the mid-1970s, the oil boom in the Arab oil-producing states resulted in a dramatic transformation of the economic and political landscape of the major labor-exporting countries of the Arab world, and Egypt is a prime example of this phenomenon. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 drastically altered the regional context in which labor emigration took place in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. In contrast to other regions, in MENA, the regional demand for labor was limited until the 1970s oil boom. As oil prices spiked in the aftermath of the 1973 war, huge revenue windfalls accrued to the oil-producing states like Iraq, Libya, and the Gulf States. Using these revenues, oilproducing states launched massive infrastructure and development projects that required more labor than the national states could supply. As a result, oil-producing states sought additional labor from outside to complete their projects. Arab workers spoke Arabic, were geographically close, and were abundant in number, and in the early decades following the oil boom, they proved to be ideal candidates to work in the petrodollar projects. In Egypt, the combination of the jump in oil prices and the onset of economic reforms in the mid-1970s resulted in a dramatic emigration of Egyptians to the oil-producing states, and what became the largest source of foreign exchange: remittances. By the early 1980s, at the very height of the boom, there were an estimated 3 million Egyptians working in the Arab oil-producing states. Moreover, while in 1970 recorded remittances from migrant workers were estimated at US $30 million, by the early 1980s official government estimates of these capital flows ranged fromUS $3 billion to US $18 billion. The reason for the discrepancy in official estimates was that workers sent their earnings primarily through informal familial and friendship networks rather than through official banking channels. This was mainly because of the continued overvaluation of the Egyptian pound and the mistrust that many workers had of formal banking institutions back home. As in other labor exporters, the avoidance of official banking channels resulted in the emergence of a large “hidden,” or parallel, economy, in remittance inflows that were