Industrial Development: a Comparative Study of Iran and Egypt (1990-2010)

Despite the pursuit of industrial development as a solution to various socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues such as the urgent need for reconstructing war damages in Iran, foreign debt crisis in Egypt, and population growth in both countries, statistical data shows only slight progress. The graph of the GDP growth, which is a reliable index for measuring industrial output, demonstrate numerous fluctuations as well as instability in the economic growth rate for both cases under the studied time period. Failing to diversify the economy, the state in Iran and Egypt at the end of this era, still relied heavily on the unproductive rents mostly from hydrocarbon exports. Why this is the case in spite of the national leadership putting industrial development on the agenda? I address this question through examining state capacity; focusing on the internal cohesion of state authority, as well as its relation to society. In so doing, comparative historical analysis and causal narrative method is used