Publication: Finances of Egyptian Listed Firms
Loading...
Date
2005-06
ISSN
Published
2005-06
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
The author presents an analysis of the finances of Egyptian listed companies evaluating recent trends in growth and profitability during the 1995-2001 period. The data from financial statements reveal the effect of the economic slowing of the past few years, especially in the construction and real estate sectors and especially in smaller companies. She finds that smaller firms appear to be less profitable and experience lower growth, likely because of being particularly adversely affected by many of the sources of the high costs of doing business in Egypt. While the Egyptian firms are not very highly leveraged on average, she finds that smaller firms have significantly less access to bank finance than larger firms do. This confirms the widely held view that there is a need to improve the availability of credit for small enterprises.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Love, Inessa. 2005. Finances of Egyptian Listed Firms. Policy Research Working Paper; No. 3639. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/8182 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Dynamic, High-Resolution Wealth Measurement in Data-Scarce Environments(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-06)Accurate and comprehensive measurement of household livelihoods is critical for monitoring progress toward poverty alleviation and targeting social assistance programs for those who most need it. However, the high cost of traditional data collection has historically made comprehensive measurement a difficult task. This paper evaluates alternative satellite-based deep learning approaches using detailed household census extracts from four African countries to accelerate progress toward comprehensive, fine-scale, and dynamic measurement of asset wealth at scale. The results indicate that transformer architectures solve multiple open measurement problems, by providing the most accurate measurement of local-level variation in household asset wealth across countries and cities, as well as changes in household asset wealth over time. Experiments that artificially restrict data availability show the model’s ability to achieve high performance with limited data. The proposed approach demonstrates the promise of combining satellite imagery, publicly available geo-features, and new deep learning architectures for hyperlocal and dynamic measurement of wealth in data-scarce environments.Publication Firm-Level Climate Change Adaptation(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-10)Are firms adapting to climate change? This paper studies this question by combining geocoded World Bank Enterprise Survey data with spatially granular weather data to estimate temperature response functions for nearly 160,000 firms in 134 countries over a 15-year period. Our results show that market imperfections in low- and middle-income countries constrain firms’ ability to adapt. Small and medium-size firms in low- and low-middle income countries are most vulnerable, with revenues declining by 12 percent in years with temperatures 0.5◦C above historical averages. The impact is equally strong for manufacturing and services firms and result from declines in labor productivity and wages. Heat-sensitive sectors and less resilient firms are more severely affected, reinforcing the causal interpretation. Unique firm-level information on policy constraints including limited financing, burdensome regulations, and unsafe conditions suggest that such factors raise adaptation costs, undermining economic resilience to climate change.Publication Beyond the AI Divide(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-24)This paper examines global disparities in artificial intelligence preparedness, using the 2023 Artificial Intelligence Preparedness Index developed by the International Monetary Fund alongside the multidimensional Economic Complexity Index. The proposed methodology identifies both global and local overperformers by comparing actual artificial intelligence readiness scores to predictions based on economic complexity, offering a comprehensive assessment of national artificial intelligence capabilities. The findings highlight the varying significance of regulation and ethics frameworks, digital infrastructure, as well as human capital and labor market development in driving artificial intelligence overperformance across different income levels. Through case studies, including Singapore, Northern Europe, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Ghana, Rwanda, and emerging demographic giants like China and India, the analysis illustrates how even resource-constrained nations can achieve substantial artificial intelligence advancements through strategic investments and coherent policies. The study underscores the need for offering actionable insights to foster peer learning and knowledge-sharing among countries. It concludes with recommendations for improving artificial intelligence preparedness metrics and calls for future research to incorporate cognitive and cultural dimensions into readiness frameworks.Publication Indigenous peoples, land and conflict in Mindanao, Philippines(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-12)This article explores the links between conflict, land and indigenous peoples in several regions of Mindano, the Philippines, notorious for their levels of poverty and conflict. The analysis takes advantage of the unprecedented concurrence of data from the most recent, 2020, census; an independent conflict data monitor for Mindanao; and administrative sources on ancestral land titling for indigenous peoples in the Philippines. While evidence elsewhere compellingly links land titling with conflict reduction, a more nuanced story emerges in the Philippines. Conflicts, including land- and resource-related conflicts, are generally less likely in districts (barangays) with higher shares of indigenous peoples. Ancestral domain areas also have a lower likelihood for general conflict but a higher likelihood for land-related conflict. Ancestral domains titling does not automatically solve land-related conflicts. When administrative delays take place (from cumbersome bureaucratic processes, insufficient resources and weak institutional capacity), titling processes may lead to sustained, rather than decreased, conflict.Publication Who on Earth Is Using Generative AI ?(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-22)Leveraging unconventional data, including website traffic data and Google Trends, this paper unveils the real-time usage patterns of generative artificial intelligence tools by individuals across countries. The paper also examines country-level factors driving the uptake and early impacts of generative artificial intelligence on online activities. As of March 2024, the top 40 generative artificial intelligence tools attract nearly 3 billion visits per month from hundreds of millions of users. ChatGPT alone commanded 82.5 percent of the traffic, yet reaching only one-eightieth of Google’s monthly visits. Generative artificial intelligence users skew young, highly educated, and male, particularly for video generation tools, with usage patterns strongly indicating productivity-related activities. Generative artificial intelligence has achieved unprecedentedly rapid global diffusion, reaching almost all economies worldwide within 16 months of ChatGPT’s release. Middle-income economies have disproportionately high adoption of generative artificial intelligence relative to their economic scale, now contribute more than 50 percent of global traffic, while low-income economies contribute less than 1 percent. Regression analysis reveals that income level, share of youth population, digital infrastructure, specialization in high-skill tradable services, English proficiency, and human capital are strongly correlated with higher uptake of generative artificial intelligence. The paper also documents disruptions in online traffic patterns and emphasizes the need for targeted investments in digital infrastructure and skills development to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Citations
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Empirical Analysis of Corporate Savings in Egypt(2011-04-01)This paper presents empirical analysis of corporate savings in Egypt using two datasets: a survey of small and medium enterprises and data from accounting statements for the largest publicly traded firms. There are two main findings. First, larger firms invest more (they have more physical saving) and have greater access to finance than smaller firms. Second, despite the financial deepening, the use of credit products has been declining during the past decade. The study reaffirms the importance of improving access to financial services in Egypt and points out the need for more research. In addition, policies aimed at reducing macroeconomic volatility are likely to result in increased investment and growth in Egypt.Publication Firm Financing in India : Recent Trends and Patterns(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-01)Using balance sheet information for nearly 6,000 firms between 1994-2003, this study investigates recent firm financing patterns in India. The paper documents the overall use of debt and, in particular, the role of bank financing (short-term and long-term), trade credit, intrabusiness group borrowing and foreign financing. The study examines financing patterns over time and explores differences across firms by sector, age, ownership type, export orientation, and, in particular, size. In terms of trends, we find that while debt to asset ratios have been relatively stable, nominal debt growth has slowed down in recent years. At the same time, firms' repayment capacity, as measured by the interest coverage ratio has exhibited a U-shaped pattern falling during 1997-99 and recovering in recent years. Throughout the period of study, bank financing as a share of total debt has increased, while borrowing from non-bank financial institutions fell sharply. In terms of differences across firms, the most robust finding is that debt levels increase with firm size. Smaller firms have especially less debt relative to larger firms if they are young (below 10 years since incorporation), if they are in the manufacturing sector, and if they are located in Southern India. Furthermore, while the ratio of debt to assets has been relatively stable for large firms, we observe a significant decline for smaller firms. Overall, the findings presented in the paper provide suggestive (but not definite) evidence of stronger credit constraints for smaller firms.Publication Do Reorganization Costs Matter for Efficiency? Evidence from a Bankruptcy Reform in Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-07)The authors study the effect of reorganization costs on the efficiency of bankruptcy laws. They develop a simple model that predicts that in a regime with high costs, the law fails to achieve the efficient outcome of liquidating unviable businesses and reorganizing viable ones. The authors test the model using the Colombian bankruptcy reform of 1999. Using data from 1,924 firms filing for bankruptcy between 1996 and 2003, they find that the pre-reform reorganization proceeding was so inefficient that it failed to separate economically viable firms from inefficient ones. In contrast, by substantially lowering reorganization costs, the reform improved the selection of viable firms into reorganization. In this sense, the new law increased the efficiency of the bankruptcy system in Colombia.Publication Is There a Distress Risk Anomaly? Corporate Bond Spread as a Proxy for Default Risk(2010-05-01)Although financial theory suggests a positive relationship between default risk and equity returns, recent empirical papers find anomalously low returns for stocks with high probabilities of default. The authors show that returns to distressed stocks previously documented are really an amalgamation of anomalies associated with three stock characteristics -- leverage, volatility and profitability. In this paper they use a market based measure -- corporate credit spreads -- to proxy for default risk. Unlike previously used measures that proxy for a firm's real-world probability of default, credit spreads proxy for a risk-adjusted (or a risk-neutral) probability of default and thereby explicitly account for the systematic component of distress risk. The authors show that credit spreads predict corporate defaults better than previously used measures, such as, bond ratings, accounting variables and structural model parameters. They do not find default risk to be significantly priced in the cross-section of equity returns. There is also no evidence of firms with high default risk delivering anomalously low returns.Publication Taxation and Capital Structure : Evidence from a Transition Economy(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-10)The authors examine the effects of taxation on financing policy using the corporate tax reform in 2001 in Croatia as a natural experiment. Since the extant literature on tax effects on capital structure studies listed firms in developed countries, it is worth investigating whether the same results apply to privately-held, small and medium size firms in transition economies. The findings provide significant evidence that lower taxes have affected the capital structure of Croatian firms, resulting in increased equity levels and decreased long-term debt levels. The authors also find that smaller and more profitable firms were more likely to reduce their debt levels. These findings are consistent with the trade-off theory of capital structure, which suggests that lower taxes decrease the incentive to hold debt due to decreasing interest tax deductibility.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.