Egypt BALANCE OF PAYMENTS AND MAIN SOURCES OF FOREIGN EXCHANGE
Sources: The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World
Factbook Balance of payments transactions are usually tabulated
under two broad categories, current account and capital account.
Current account includes visible (merchandise) trade as well as
invisible items, such as tourism, shipping, and profits and
other moneys earned overseas. In Egypt the credit side of the
current account balance was heavily influenced by four items:
oil, the Suez Canal, tourism, and workers' remittances. Their
share in total resources (GDP plus net imports) climbed to about
45 percent in the early 1980s, from 6 percent in 1974. It
declined afterward but continued to be the backbone of the
economy. These four items also contributed considerably more to
Egypt's foreign exchange income than they did to the country's
total resources. A common characteristic of these items was that
they were "exogenous" resources, i.e., their productivity had
little relationship to Egy