Since its inception at the Washington Consensus in 1989 in response to stagflation in the West, the neoliberal paradigm has been debated within the development discourse along with the advent of post-coloniality. The ultimate purpose of neoliberalism positions itself as the opposite of statism - minimal government intervention and leaving the market to its invisible hand to organize itself efficiently. The mechanism by which this is achieved falls under the recipe of the structural adjustment program (SAP) prompted by International Financial Institutions (IFI) such as the World Bank and IMF. SAP includes a list of objectives that will allegedly promote growth and development: Fiscal austerity, privatization of state-owned enterprises, trade liberalization, deregulation, and currency devaluation. Even though IFIs were initially meant for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe in the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, their arms extended to “third world” countries’ development later. In Egypt, it was during the regime of Sadat and Mubarak that the ‘open door’ policy was introduced in 1974, and later under the cabinet of Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif neoliberalism penetrated the economic sphere of Egypt in 2004. Even though those policies faced a huge backlash from civil society, they are still prevalent to this very day. This paper will address the following aspects I) how the structural adjustment program recipe of the IFI does not actually lay the foundation for medium or long-term economic development, despite achieving rising macroeconomic figures in the short-run; II) how economic liberalization was not accompanied by political liberalization and social justice, marked by the January 2011 uprising and a great dismantlement of democratic structures like weakening trade unions; III) targeted developmental state model and policies - for Egypt to follow - pursued previously by the Asian Tigers with a particular focus on South Korea for its historical and structural resemblance to Egypt.