If the government and business associations do not stand together, the Egyptian economic growth rate will not reach 7% in 2008 and will instead decline to 3% or 4% in the worst case scenario, Trade and Industry Minister Rashid Mohamed Rashid said.
This means that jobless figures will increase due to more and more graduates every year, he added.
He affirmed that the entire world economic growth rate would not exceed 3% in 2009 against 5% in 2007, adding that even the very strong Japanese economy would go down to 5%.
The economic growth rates of other countries may be 0%, he said.
During the annual party of the American Chamber of Commerce, Rashid called on banks to help the government and use their liquidity in Egyptian pound and foreign currencies to pump more investments and therefore support sectors - such as tourism, exports, real estate, transportation and banking retail - that will be affected by the global financial crisis.
He also called on banks to help the government boost consumption so that demand will increase, especially as the entire world suffers from liquidity shortage.
The Egyptian economy came in third after Indonesia and Singapore in a recent report by Swiss Credit Institution on economies that do not risk anything by receiving direct foreign investments in light of the global financial crisis, Rashid said.
The size of world trade will retreat from 9.3% to 4.1% this year, which portends that the Suez Canal revenues will decrease. Therefore, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director Pascal Lami held an urgent meeting to discuss ways to face the crisis.
The world's financial crisis is the worst since the Great Depression that hit the US economy in 1930, but European states did not expect that their economics would be affected this way. The Europeans failed to face the crisis when they thought it was a US crisis that would not affect them.
The prices of real estates in the US and Britain decreased by 15%-20% amid expectations of further decrease.
According to reports by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), global losses due to the crisis will hit $1.4 trillion, $760 billion losses of US banks and $15 trillion losses of world's capital markets, Minister Rashid said.
Rashid said this is a crisis of "trust", a word with which politicians deal "day and night" till it leads to losses of trillions. The US economy suffers the absence of trust between citizens and banks, he added.
On the other hand, the crisis has some positive aspects that will be reflected on normal people in Egypt, as Rashid put it in his comment on the shiny side of the crisis. The prices of commodities worldwide will decrease by 16%, while those of food will go down by 15%.
