Universities, Industrial Clusters, and Economic Development in Egypt

This paper explores the role of industrial clusters in the development of the Egyptian universities & research institutes (URIs), and economic performance. The study hypothesizes that the large industrial clusters in Egypt are old and traditional, and have weak impact on URIs, and economic performance. To this end, we examine Egypt regions where that contain long-existing and traditional industrial clusters are compared to all other regions. The analysis is conducted separately for seven industries, and by using a Mann-Whitney U test and a spearman correlation we find that the more recent and technical industrial clusters in Egypt have a positive and significant impact on URIs , but they have a weak impact on economic performance. The Egyptian experience suggests that the most important contribution of clusters to URIS is one in which corporations contribute money to universities, or enter in to informal consulting arrangements with a professor, neither of which typically of professional patent applications or even through the mobility of university graduates.