Samer Soliman's thoughtful and, in many ways, prescient analysis of Egyptian political economy is important reading for anyone interested in understanding the long-term economic roots of the 2011 push for political change in Egypt. The Autumn of Dictatorship—originally published in Cairo in Arabic under the title Strong Regime, Weak State: Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt under Mubarak (2006)—tells the story of the hollowing out of the Egyptian state over a period of almost 30 years. Soliman's primary argument is straightforward: The Egyptian state suffered from a series of revenue shocks that forced the Mubarak regime to engage in acts of predation that undermined its political position over time.

The basic puzzle confronts regimes of various types—how to deal with a “steep decline of revenue” (p. 2). Soliman describes Egypt as a rentier state—though not of the classic, large-scale oil-exporting type. Rather, he writes that Egypt can be considered a rentier state as a result of its reliance on a combination of Suez Canal rents, foreign aid, and expatriate worker remittances as primary sources of hard currency. Following the decline in world oil prices in 1986, Egypt entered a period of fiscal crisis as rents declined as a percentage of GDP and government indebtedness increased. By 1990, it appeared as though the country would go into default when Egyptian participation in the international coalition to drive Iraq out of Kuwait led the United States and various Gulf states to forgive billions of dollars in Egyptian debt. This proved to be only a temporary fix, however, as the Egyptian state failed to compensate for the loss of rentier income over time with domestically generated sources. In the absence of a solution to this problem, the Mubarak regime allowed the state apparatus (apart from military and security institutions) to degrade over time, while simultaneously encouraging predation on the part of regime stalwarts in the business community.

Soliman organizes his narrative as follows. Chapter 1 describes both the upswing and eventual downturn in state revenue over time, with a particular focus on the effect of the decline of world oil prices in 1986 and the associated plunge in Egyptian rentier revenue. Chapter 2 explores the highly useful distinction between state and regime, and describes the regime's increase in budget outlays to ministries seen as key to safeguarding stability. Chapter 3 investigates how local government dealt with the decline in financial support from Cairo. Chapter 4 examines how the Egyptian regime responded to the decline in external revenue with a special focus on the move to what Soliman describes as predatory forms of revenue generation. Chapter 5 refines his critique of the existing literature on the rentier state and describes the growing political influence of businessmen in the years leading up to the 2011 protest demonstrations.

At its core, the book is a study in public finance in a country where the details surrounding government revenue and expenditure remain opaque, at best. Rather than simply accepting the formal, prospective budget plan put forward by the regime, Soliman was able to gain access to the closing balance sheet of the Egyptian general budget—a set of documents that calculates actual public revenue and expenditures. It is important to note that the information in the closing account can differ considerably from that which was put forward in the published budget. At the time the closing balance sheets were obtained by Soliman, this was a very difficult task (though today, some of this information is more readily available).

Among the many fascinating narratives put forward by Soliman is the story of how center-periphery relations evolved in the wake of the state's growing fiscal crisis. The account he offers is informative: He argues that the central government actively encouraged governorates to develop their own sources of revenue (p. 93) and describes two primary modes by which this development took place. Both possible models involved the creation of special funds from local sources, and localities enjoyed considerable flexibility both with regard to how these funds were generated and how they were spent. In one, the business community was approached as a source of funding for public projects in an arrangement that might euphemistically be deemed a “public–private partnership.” It would have been interesting to get more details from Soliman on what the businessmen received in return for their participation in these schemes, beyond the public recognition that he describes in the book. The second survival strategy for localities involved the creation of new fees charged by the governorate. The fees included high penalties for traffic violations and other minor offenses; funds generated were put into the provision of improved public goods. The message the author seeks to convey is more about heterogeneous local response to fiscal crisis than it is a narrative about successful decentralization of power, however.

Soliman further argues that the regime's crisis of legitimacy was tied to its failure to take care of what he describes as the “limited-income sector” made up primarily of public-sector employees. Seeking to make up for budget shortfalls, the Mubarak regime levied a number of “hidden” taxes that hit this segment of the population particularly hard. These included an “inflation tax” that degraded the value of public-sector salaries. Although inflation was seen as a way “to finance government bureaucracy,” the strategy actually “ricocheted against that bureaucracy” (p. 100). The salary structure within the public sector was also a source of grievance for state employees. While low-level bureaucrats saw the value of their salaries erode with inflation, high-placed public-sector officials were reaping tremendous benefit from their positions of power. Soliman cites the case of a public-sector newspaper staff where editors in chief of state-owned papers—acting in their capacities as heads of a newspaper's board of directors—took commissions for advertisements, as well as a percentage of overall newspaper profits, huge amounts of money. All the while, beat reporters earned the equivalent of US $100 a month.

Much about Soliman's narrative suggests the inevitability of large-scale public protest. Like the many existing accounts documenting the relative strengths and vulnerabilities of the Mubarak regime, his is not able to offer an answer to the question of why the fiscal crisis generated large-scale public protest in January 2011, as opposed to some other previous time (citizen grievance and weakened state capacity were features of the system for many years). This seems less a deficiency of the research, however, than a challenge of explaining why “now out of never” for any form of political change where the underlying conditions of weakness have long been present. The key counterfactual question remains, however: In the absence of the long-term fiscal crisis, would the regime have persisted? And would it have been able to withstand the spark of popular protest in Tunisia? Soliman's narrative would seem to suggest yes, though this is not a question that he addresses directly.

The Arabic edition of the book has been influential within Egypt, as has Soliman himself. He is a founding member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, as well as an editor of Al-Bosla, an independent leftist publication. Autumn of Dictatorship appears to have gone to press in that narrow window of time between the beginning of large-scale public protest and the removal of Mubarak from power. Without knowledge of events to follow, Soliman offers the following set of predictions for Egypt's future: “Egypt will be ruled in the coming years by a marriage between the military and business establishments. The next president could come from either one or the other; what counts is that the ruling establishment consists of elements from both” (p. 151). Given developments in Egypt since the publication of the book, Soliman's expectations appear on their way to being borne out.