Morocco's Growth and Employment Prospects: Public Policies to Avoid the Middle-Income Trap

Abstract

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

A Simple Macrofiscal Model for Policy Analysis: An Application to Morocco

“…In particular, our results suggest that Morocco's economy was somewhat overheated before the GFC (with the nonagricultural output gap estimated in the model being close to the output gap in the IMF WEO database and shown in Chart 1), driven both by low interest rates and the undervalued exchange rate (Figure 7). The estimates further suggest that while the fiscal balance worsened after the GFC, GDP growth markedly slowed after the crisis, presumably due to supply-side developments outside of our framework (see Pinto Moreira 2019). There seemed to be only very limited demand-side shocks post-GFC.…”

Polarization and its discontents: Morocco before and after the Arab Spring

“…In contrast, the share of households stating that their welfare improved increases monotonically with consumption: higher deciles show a higher propensity to have a positive perception. A generalized sense of a highly polarized society in which only the top deciles were perceived to have benefitted from the slow and volatile growth of the 1990s had already begun to form in early 2000 (Pinto Moreira, 2019).…”