The Good News from Egypt – and the Bad – Iqtisadi Vol. 5, No. 9 (September 25, 2015) | Dayan

At the beginning of August 2015, President ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi inaugurated the expansion of the Suez Canal project. It added 35 kilometers (km) of new channels to the existing canal, forming a parallel side channel running about one-third the length of the existing canal. An additional 35km of the original canal were dredged to make way for larger ships. The Suez Canal Authority claims that the expansion will lower waiting times for ships and will more than double annual revenues to $13.2 billion by 2023. That increase would reportedly require a nine percent annual increase in the volume global trade, although between 2005 and 2013, international trade grew by an annual average rate of only three percent. The canal has immense political as well as economic significance for Egypt, as a brief look at its history will show.