In this budget, which is available here, lists all kinds of goodies. I didn’t get time to get to the nitty-gritty, but just on the first few pages you get some interesting figures about the presidency. On page two, it says the presidency got LE98m in FY04/05, LE121m in 05/06, and LE140m in 06/07. Considering how much traveling gets done by the president, these figures — around $22-25m — seem quite small. Maybe there’s another budget elsewhere, but it seems to me there are going to be some figures that are simply not reliable. Probably because the Ministry of Finance itself doesn’t have access to the real data.
There’s a lot of interest statistics in there, and someone savvy could really do something interesting with them. Let us know if you spot any other dodgy figure.
I don’t think that at the end of day you can do much more with this then backing your political commentary, as Hossam rightfully did when comparing Adly’s budget with those for housing, health, etc.
A lot seems to be either missing or is not explained – e.g where is the Arab Organization for Industrialization. Is this included in the Defence Budget, or under Ministry of Investment?
Another example: the Authority for School Buildings has an enormous budget. But funds for maintaining schools are included in the Ministry of Education budget, and they are so limited and in no appropriate proportion to the budget of that authority that some schools are run-down one year later due to lack of maintenance. You just can’t get important correlations like this one from the budget.
I also think that amongst Egyptian Ministries, the MoF is one of the hardest to get information from. A few months ago, they did a study on the effect of oil subsidies, apparently to prepare arguments for increasing fuel prices. But when I called them up three days after Buthros-Ghali had publicly quoted that study, they told me it was not public, and that they had specific orders not to release it to the press.