ICGE Competition Offers Solutions to Egypt’s Budget Deficit
By: Rania Yehia
@RaniaYehia
ICGE’s competitors were given six hours to work on a plan to consolidate Egypt’s budget.
To further raise the difficulty of the competition, the participants were not given the topic they would be working on before the competition started, giving them no time to prepare.
“We decided not to tell the participants about the topic of the competition because we wanted to test their knowledge and whether they can use what they learnt throughout their academic years at AUC,” said ICGE Competition Director Yasser Ezz.
The competition was judged by three panelists: Ahmed El-Safty, visiting associate professor of practice at the Economics Department; Ali Shah, assistant professor and associate chair of the department of economics; and Ahmed Sahlol, deputy director of the Macro-Prudential Unit at the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE).
“I really like the competition. I think it is creative and valuable. What makes it different is that the students were not prepared beforehand. It also kind of gives them a sense of how things go in the field of Macro Prudential but also any other profession,” Sahlol told The Caravan.
The first place team won a job shadowing trip to Germany where they will get to visit world-renowned companies Allianz and Daimler, as well as the European Central Bank.
The runner up teams won cash prizes: EGP 8,000 for second place and EGP 5,000 for third place.
“I definitely encourage anyone seeking a mental challenge to participate in this competition as they will be able to use their minds creatively to try and solve problems which even government officials struggle to find solutions to,” said Mostafa El-Bakly, a member of the winning team.
ICGE was founded 16 years ago under the superviision of the Department of Management of the School of Business.
The club hosts an annual economics and business conference with 450 student delegates and over 100 member students.
In the past two years, the club held two business-competitions: PepsiCo and the Hult Prize.
The topic of the competition was especially relevant given the country’s current economic condition.
Egypt has been suffering from a widening budget deficit since the 2011 uprising.
The government has been working on a series of economic reforms, which included the floatation of the national currency last November as an essential condition for the receipt of a USD 12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Rising inflation has pushed the deficit past $1 billion in the first half of 2017, amounting to 5.4 percent of the country’s GDP, as reported by the Finance Ministry on February 28.
