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Muhsen Mashhour sits in the waiting room of Giza governorate's Small Enterprise Service Unit, a newly-established "one-stop shop" to help would-be entrepreneurs navigate the maze of agencies regulating the establishment of small businesses in Egypt, and the banks that might give them loans.
Two years ago, Mashhour applied for an 10,000 Egyptian pound loan using the salary of a friend with a stable government job as collateral - a standard practice throughout the Arab world - and used it to set up a shop selling kitchen appliances. "It was very easy - in two months I had everything ready," he says.
Today he is back for another injection of capital to expand.
Small businesses such as Mashhour's are intended to be an engine of employment in the Arab world, soaking up the millions of job-seekers who come on to the market each year.
But although Mashhour's story suggests that the process of setting up a registered private sector business is getting easier, it is still not easy enough.
In much of the Middle East and North Africa, economies are still in transition from the socialism of the 1960s and 1970s to a more free market-based system.
In the past, private sector development was hamstrung by poor infrastructure and a tough regulatory environment, but Arabs who completed secondary school were guaranteed work in the public sector. Now governments are trimming their public sectors, blocking new recruits.
While the number of private-sector jobs is growing fast at more than 7.7 per cent a year from 1998 to 2006, it is not growing fast enough to offset the declining role of the government.
According to Egyptian labour market surveys cited by Ragui Assaad, regional director of the New York-based Population Council, 10 per cent of Egypt's workforce had formal private sector jobs in 2006, compared with eight per cent in 1998.
However, in 1998, 39 per cent found work in government enterprises, whose share of workers fell to 30 per cent in 2006 as Egypt continues its transition away from a state-driven economy.
The remainder is soaked up by informal sector employment or unpaid family labour - including many secondary school graduates who, a generation ago, could expect to have a secure government job, with health insurance and a pension.
While salaries are not necessarily much worse, informal sector employment lacks prestige and stability.
Expectations
This can make it difficult, for example, for a young worker to win permission from his fiancee's family to marry her.
"Thirty years of guaranteed employment has built a certain level of expectation - in order to get married, you need to have that formal job," says Mr Assaad.
The ideal solution would be for informal enterprises to be able to make the jump to the formal sector, which means that they could hire more workers, subcontract to larger firms, qualify for more kinds of finance, and otherwise be able to expand. However, long and costly procedures and high taxes create a disincentive for small companies to go public.
Although governments realise the need for informal businesses to formalise, in practice it can be very difficult to change the long-established habits of municipal councils, tax authorities, health officials and numerous other institutions. Khalid Al Gazawi, director of operations for Quality Finance International, which provides consultancy to micro-finance institutions, says that in his home country of Jordan, a typical informal sector labourer - such as a woman who made yoghurt in her home - would need to visit more than five separate government agencies to get a licence.
Once she did get a licence, moreover, she might have to pay up to 27 per cent of her revenues in taxes - creating an incentive to stay small, sell to her neighbours, and escape the notice of the authorities.
The Arab world's powerful internal security apparatuses can also intrude on a small business. Their permission is usually required to open a video rental, says Al Gazawi, lest a proprietor use his or her shop to distribute politically sensitive materials.
Agencies such as Egypt's Small Enterprise Service Unit, exemplify policies made at the top level of government aimed at speeding up the creation of businesses at the bottom. However, the new philosophy at the top might take a long time to filter down.
Ahmad is the owner of a small restaurant he has been waiting for four years to register his store. "In Egypt, you cannot wait for a licence to start doing business," he says. However, obtaining a licence does have one key pay-off - you pay less of a bribe when the inspectors pay a visit.
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