رشد بهره وری و تغییرات تکنولوژیکی جانبدارانه: مورد مطالعه هتل های مراکش

This paper proposes a procedure to analyze Moroccan hotels productivity, based on Luenberger productivity indicator to estimate and decompose productivity change into efficiency change and technological change. This paper enlarges the procedure and further decomposes technological change to study the sources of bias in technological change. Therefore, a clearer and more enlightening view of tourism productivity change emerges. Policy implications are developed.

In many countries of the world, the importance of tourism in terms of policy can be explained by its economic repercussions. It is the case of Morocco which intends to contribute to its economic development by stimulating its tourism industry. Along this line, the plan “Vision 2010” consisted to reach some scores in 2010. Among others, it can be stated the following: (i) 10 million of tourist arrivals; (ii) 7 million of tourists lodged in hotels (1–5 stars); (iii) construction of 80,000 rooms. These findings underline that tourism, and particularly the hospitality sector, becomes a very important strategic tool in Morocco in terms of economic development and policy. There are none recent studies about the hospitality sector in Morocco and then a natural question is first to analyze the efficiency and productivity of this last. In this paper we analyze the efficiency and productivity change of a sample of Moroccan hotels by using the Luenberger productivity indicator. First, we decompose the productivity into technical efficiency variation and technological change. Second, we decompose the technological change component in order to test their source, which can be neutral or biased. The methodology used encompasses the traditional exercise of efficiency and productivity measurement by analyzing the nature of the technological change. It is of a great interest in the case where productivity variations between two time periods are driven by the technological change. We follow the recent theoretical contribution by Briec et al. (2006) about parallel neutrality. The paper unfolds as follows. In the next section, the tourism context in Morocco as well as the hotel sector will be described and analyzed. In Section 3, we propose a survey in efficiency measures in the hotel industry. The Section 4 exposes the method. The empirical results, which illustrate the usefulness of our approach, are presented and analyzed in Section 5. Finally, Section 6 concludes.

This paper has proposed a framework for determining productivity changes of a sample of the Moroccan hotels. The general conclusion is that productivity increased for all hotels analyzed under the period considered. Decomposition of the Luenberger productivity indicator allows identifying the source of this growth. We observe that the good performances of the Moroccan hotels are almost always explained by an improvement of technical progress. Our findings encompass several combinations of efficiency and technological changes, signifying that there is room for adjustment in almost all hotels in order to achieve best-practice procedures in hotel management. One the one hand, the primary managerial implication of the paper is that the inefficient hotel's management must upgrade its procedures regarding operational activities in order to increased efficiency. Managers can also try to change the hotels strategy in ways that will allow it to rise above the average. Example of the way forward includes the adoption of pro-active strategies that capitalize on the growth of new market segment. Efficiency is partly endogenous to the enterprise, and therefore it is up to the management to improve it. But the rules of the game, including ethics (fair game), could be changed in its favour, and could allow some hotels to out-perform their less insightful rivals. On the other hand, it can be stated that the productivity is driven by technological change for all hotels. Clearly the technological change component has a positive impact on productivity and then the managers should focus on it in order to continue to improve theirs competitiveness. The decomposition of technological change component underlines that the passage of time affects both the marginal rate of technical substitution between inputs and outputs. In other words, technological change is not neutral. This indicates some evidence about choices and strategies from the managers and a good understanding and characterization of this technical change is a key point for future productivity improvement.Finally, the main limitations of the present study are the following: first, it is one of the first assessments of tourism performance in Morocco and then we cannot compare directly our results with other contributions. Second, due to a constraint of data availability, our sample is restricted. It could be interesting to incorporate more variables in order to obtain a more precise analysis. Third, recent tourism policy in Morocco concern the tourism product and hotel supply in order to satisfy the highest standards of quality. In addition to the usual criteria for equipment, hygiene and security it is already envisaged to include new requirements for ecology and sustainable tourism. This new criteria will focuses more on the environmental dimension and could be a factor in the efficiency analysis. Then, future research is required to extend and/or confirm the present results.