"Egypt has a strong banking system that helped ease the fallout of the current global financial crisis," said Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif on Tuesday21/10/2008.

In his speech at the closing session of the Euromoney conference, Nazif ruled out that the Egyptian market would be largely affected by the ongoing financial crunch.

Nazif also attributed such a favorable state of affairs to financial and economic reforms adopted by Egypt.

"Our economic growth rate reached last year 7.5 per cent," he said, adding that creating jobs has also been increased by eight per cent annually.

There are still some challenges facing the Egyptian economy, said Nazif, citing the food and fuel price hikes.

The Prime Minister said that the Egyptian banking system will extend over the coming phase more financial credits to the private sector to enable it to carry out development projects in the various domains.

Reforms that were introduced to the banking system over the past three years contributed to a great extent to ease the effects from the current global financial crunch, he added.


Egypt's economic strategy seeks to expand infrastructure projects, especially in the sectors of transport, roads and agriculture.

The Egyptian economy, he said, has been slightly affected by the current international financial crisis in spite of the high economic growth rates realized over the past three years.