اقتصاد سیاسی رشد در مراکش

This paper is an attempt to explain the relatively low performance of the Moroccan economy during the last four decades using a political economy approach. In that period, the Moroccan society benefited from sophisticated institutions that facilitated policy coordination and commitment. But, the existing institutions hampered the participation of large segments of the population and political parties representing them in the policymaking process. Also, the centralization of administration hindered local initiatives. However, numerous and significant structural reforms have been undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s and in recent years a strategy has been adopted that combines continued economic liberalization, increased democratization, and efforts to reduce poverty and promote human development. These changes have started to bear fruit in the past few years.

Various attempts have been made to explain Morocco's weak performance despite major reforms. The World Bank (2006) identifies seven obstacles to growth: rigidities of the labor market, importance of the tax burden, the exchange rate regime, the level of protectionism, the weakness in information, coordination of the private and public sectors and the training of employees. Sekkat (2004) finds that population growth; weather conditions and mismanagement of economic policy had a negative impact on growth over the 1960–1998 period. Chemingui (2005) argues that institutions have strong impact on the growth level and volatility and on productivity performance. Gray (1997), who observes that GDP per capita and overall economic conditions were not significantly different between Morocco and some East Asian countries in the 1960s, argues that Morocco's slower growth is in part due to a lack of competition in some major industries due to rent seeking activities. In this paper, we attempt examine the reasons why the Moroccan institutions were unable to foster incentives for economic agents to invest and improve productivity since the 1960s. The paper attempts to provide elements of response based on the political economy of growth. It is inspired by the leading work of Dr. Heba Handoussa1 on the political economy of Arab countries. The methodology used is the one developed in the GDN framework papers by Esfahani (2006), Castanheira and Esfahani (2003) and Bates and Devarajan (2001).

The interactions of political actors in Morocco have changed since independence toward greater democratization of society. For a long period economic issues were not a priority for the State, which viewed the country's cohesion and the control of the polity as the main priority. The low attention given to economic issues influenced the economic policy choices. It facilitated rent extraction and failed to create the conditions for sufficient growth. The need to build political support might explain in part the fact that growth inducing policies were not adopted right after independence. The country is relatively well endowed with resources but its economy does not rely on one particular resource. Socio-economic groups interact and contract over a set of diversified economic resources. These resources determined to some extend the importance and structure of rent extraction but played until recently insufficient role in the definition of economic policies. The interactions of the political actors are structured based on relatively secure and complex institutions which however suffered from weaknesses in the representation of the policy makers, the lack of sufficient commitment on a number of issues and the difficulties in coordination. The institutional framework has however allowed the adoption and implementation (albeit with numerous shortcomings) of important and far reaching reforms in the recent decades. The attention given in recent years to social issues and increased democratization associated with the structural reforms of the economy are starting to give positive results. The paper shows that economic policy has been influenced in recent decades by the political issues discussed in Esfahani (2006) in the context of the Middle East and North Africa and Bates and Devarajan (2001) in the African context.