"This book is both uniquely broad and deep in its approach to understanding Egypt’s development ‘failure’ which has occurred despite massive external support provided to the country. It presents a model by which similar developmental failures, whether in the MENA or elsewhere, can be analyzed and compared."

- Robert Springborg, Naval Postgraduate School, USA 
 

"Sarah’s work is an excellent contribution to the political economy of Egypt and the Middle East. It studies Egypt’s globalized trade and investment sectors. It reveals how foreign financial and developmental institutions were part of the networks of state-business relations, which has been hardly addressed before."

- Amr Adly, The American University in Cairo, Egypt
 

"Interdisciplinary in methodology and theoretical orientation, Cronyism and Elite Capture in Egypt provides the most persuasive account of the networks, domestic and international, that shaped Egypt’s global market integration on neoliberal terms and reaped its benefits. Smierciak also reveals herself as a gifted narrator, and the result is an eminently readable story, absorbing and infuriating in equal parts, of crony capitalism in the late Mubarak era."

- Roberto Roccu, King’s College London, UK