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Abdel-Fadil Mahmoud, The Political Economy of Nasserism: A Study in Employment and Income Distribution Policies in Urban Egypt 1952–72. University of Cambridge Department of Applied Economics. Occasional Paper, No. 52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Pp. xii + 140.

Nasserism of one kind or another became a common feature of Third World politics in the second half of the twentieth century, as military rulers took over the government of their Eastern countries and attempted to accelerate the "modernization" of their societies. During that process the military regimes (at least those of the Arab world) rarely hesitated to nationalize the property of local landowners and capitalists (tainted by their association with colonialism) or to extend the power of the state to regulate national economies in the name of independence, progress and equality. Although he has interesting things to say about the rate of economic progress achieved in Egypt since 19S2, Mahmoud AbdelFadil̂ s primary interest is in equality and social change. Who, or rather which, social groups, he asks, gained from the revolution of 1952 and the subsequent transformation of the Egyptian economy, and how did the class structure change under the impact of Nasserism? To help us answer such questions Professor Fadil has written two monographs in the form of occasional papers for the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge. His second study focusing on the urban economy is the logical sequel to his earlier research on Development Income Distribution and Social Change in Rural Egypt, 1952-70, published in 1975. Both studies exemplify the strengths and weaknesses of Fadil's basic method, which consists essentially of highly professional exercises in applied statistics. Both books abound with tables, graphs and figures related to the measurement of income distribution in the rural and urban economies of contemporary Egypt. There cannot be an official source which the author has failed to scrutinize. If the statistics seem relevant he presents them in proper form. Although Fadil tends towards the uncritical in his acceptance of official figures, there can be no argument that the data collected and calibrated in both books will be extremely useful to scholars interested in this period. Again and again they will turn to Fadil's tables for enlightenment on such topics as the allocation of labour, movements in real wages, income distribution, trends in consumption and to his excellent analysis of changes in the structure of taxation from 1952-1972. Students of modern Egypt will not, however, derive as much enlightenment from his terse commentary on the data. For example, the conclusions in Chapter One that services in general and Government employment in particular absorbed the bulk of new entrants into the urban work force is well-supported with figures but is hardly surprising. Some adumbration would have been interesting in order to place the employment problem in perspective. Was the growth, for example, of employment in Egyptian urban services out of line with the experience of other developing countries at comparable levels of per capita income? Secondly, what proportion of the work force in services provided support for the growth of commodity output and what share might be classified as a functional alternative to open unemployment for countries suffering from population pressure and too poor to afford effective systems of social security? Fadil's highly original chapter, "Informal Employment in the Urban Sector," suggests that a whole range of jobs in services grow in step with the creation of "productive employment" in industry. Obviously the process could become dangerously unbalanced. But this study contains no discussion of how well the policies pursued from 1952-1972 coped or failed to cope with a rapidly increasing supply of labour to the towns. Obviously the problem was contained well short of social revolution.