Beyond the rentier State: questions of path dependency The case of post-1990 Egypt The rentier State literature suggested broad economic and political implications for the State dependency on rents. Economically, Dutch disease-like effects were perceived to hinder the development of productive sectors in the economy (Abdelkhalek 2001), as States become increasingly disinterested in extending productive bases for their revenues. Politically, rentier characters of the State were linked to authoritarianism (Bellin 2004, Lucciani and Beblawi 1987). In a nutshell, the rentier State has been rather an incarnation of a "resource curse" that entraps developing States and economies into a low-low equilibrium either economically or politically. Accordingly, the decline of the share of rents in State revenues as well as in total GDP was viewed to revive the motivation for the cultivation of productive revenue bases for the State dependent on broader economic growth. However, it has been empirically observed that States that suffered from constant decline of rents due to depleted oil reserves and geo-political changes, such as Egypt since the 1990s, have had considerable problems of adjustment the generation of more productive bases of economic growth and consequently of State revenues. I argue along the line of Karl (1997) that not only does rentierism define the nature of the economy and the ruling regimes, but also it defines the institutional capacities of the State creating a path dependency. Hence, rentier States suffering from depleted rents have to tackle a whole legacy of institutions that constrain (or enable) the attempts to shift into better developmental trajectories. I claim that Egypt since the early 1990s has been showing the above mentioned path dependency. Despite the constantly declining shares of rents in total State revenues and GDP since early 1990s (Soliman 2005), the capacity of the State to diversify exports away from oil, and shift into tax revenue bases have rather met limited success. In this study, I aim at tracing the evolution of Egyptian State institutions operating in the fields of industry and trade on the one hand, and those of finance on the other throughout the 1990s and till currently.