Regulation for Reputation in the Egyptian Delta

T aking as a theoretical point of departure the idea that commodities in international trade are envelopes for the exchange of factors of production, an obvious question is what was the factor of production in which Egypt was well endowed? The factor of production in which Egypt was best endowed was the labor of her children and this, I shall show, was the crucial factor input for cotton production. If, as most Egyptians understood at the time, child labor was crucial for the production of highquality cotton in Egypt, a related issue is how were Egyptians able to mobilize such a low-quality input for such a high-quality output. The answer lies in the very sophisticated public and private institutions developed in Egypt to transmit information about prices and to assure the compliance of everyone engaged in the cotton economy with the production of a high-quality good. Egypt therefore is not an example of a country with a weak or poor institutional structure but the reverse. It was a country where institutional capacity—private as well as public—facilitated the use of an abundant but seemingly unsuitable factor of production to make a high-quality good. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Business · Economics · Factors of production · Microeconomics · Point (geometry) · Political science · Production (economics) · Quality (philosophy) · Reputation · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Islamic Studies and History · Mathematics · Socioeconomic Development in MENA