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Abstract
Home to the advent of investor-state dispute settlement in 1864, Egypt today is an exemplar business partner representing the Middle East and North Africa. In 2024, the country received its largest foreign direct investment (FDI) deal in the 35 billion dollars Ras El Hekma land sale to the United Arab Emirates. The development agenda Egypt Vision 2030 aims to double FDI’s share of GDP and amass 100 billion dollars between 2040 and 2030. In the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring, foreign investors (FIs) fear that weak rule of law and judicial independence hinder the institutional quality necessary to receive fair and equitable treatment. Beyond allowing arbitration, bilateral investment treaties (BITs) have trended international investment law away from the exhaustion of local remedies towards, at times, supplanting the judiciary altogether. Antithetical to their concerns, FIs supersede the very rule of law they take issue with in favor of special treatment above their domestic counterparts. This paper interrogates BIT design, classifies them by procedural access to domestic courts, calculates relationships between popular FIs to Egypt and their ISDS adjudication times, and how the state succumbs to sovereignty in the name of economic development to the investment treaty regime. It finds that resilient judicial independence and property rights positively correlate with FDI inflows, while the rule of law and legal integrity hurt GDP. Results affirm previous studies, which suggest that authoritarian regimes’ over-distribution of power diminishes institutional strengths and, inadvertently, value state financial wins over the development of national investment policy meant to safeguard civil society’s best interest.