Morocco's Growth and Employment Prospects : Public Policies to Avoid the Middle-Income Trap
This paper studies Morocco's growth and employment prospects in the context of a new growth model aimed at allowing the country, in a rapidly changing international environment marked by increased competition from low-wage economies and growin...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/687731552311079783/Moroccos-Growth-and-Employment-Prospects-Public-Policies-to-Avoid-the-Middle-Income-Trap http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31395 |
| Summary: | This paper studies Morocco's growth
and employment prospects in the context of a new growth
model aimed at allowing the country, in a rapidly changing
international environment marked by increased competition
from low-wage economies and growing automation of
low-skilled jobs, to avoid falling into a middle-income
trap. The first part reviews the growth model that Morocco
has pursued in the past few decades and discusses its
limitations going forward. The second part characterizes the
proposed growth model, which involves, in particular,
promoting the transition from labor-intensive imitation
activities to technology-intensive innovation activities,
increasing public investment in advanced infrastructure,
improving the quality of education, improving productivity
and increasing value added in key sectors (including
agriculture, high-end tourism, and renewable energy), and
implementing measures designed to promote women's
participation in the labor force and reduce gender
inequality. The third part attempts to quantify the
medium-run effects of these policies on growth, employment,
and unemployment in Morocco. The paper concludes that to
achieve high-income status and reduce unemployment
significantly, Morocco will need to implement far-reaching
reforms, to increase growth to a range of 6-7 percent and
improve employment creation to about 35,000 jobs per
percentage point of growth. |
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