Egypt is the fourth most-vulnerable market to any sign of EM distress: Bloomberg’s most recent emerging markets vulnerability scorecard ranked Egypt as the fourth economy most at risk of in the event the US raises interest rates. Since the index was last released in November, Argentina has overtaken Turkey as the most vulnerable EM, while Egypt and South Africa retained their fourth and third positions, respectively.

Where have we gotten better? Foreign currency reserves saw the most pronounced sign of improvement. A measure for our current account balance also improved marginally.

Where is there still room for improvement? Egypt is still the lowest-scoring country on the list in government effectiveness, which measures the ability of the state to deal with external shocks. We missed last quarter’s inflation target by a wider margin than in the third quarter of 2018. Alongside that, our short-term external debt position worsened by 1.7 bps.