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Presentation of the Book “Morocco’s Growth and Employment Prospects: Public Policies to avoid the Middle-income Trap”

From

11
9:30 am February 2020

To

11
12:00 pm February 2020

by invitation

The Policy Center for the New South is organising in partnership with the Ministry of Economics and Finance the book presentation under the theme “Morocco’s Growth and Employment Prospects: Public Policies to avoid the Middle-income Trap” by Mr. Emmanuel Pinto Moreira on Tuesday, February 11 in Rabat.

This book 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 lowwage economies and growing automation of low-skilled jobs, to avoid falling into a middle-income trap. Chapter 1 introduces the changing nature of the international environment facing Morocco and provides the rationale for changing the country’s growth model. Chapter 2 reviews the growth model that Morocco has pursued in the past few decades and discusses its limitations going forward. Chapter 3 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. Chapter 4 attempts to quantify the medium-run effects of these policies on growth, employment, and unemployment in Morocco. It 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.

Speakers
Emmanuel Pinto Moreira
Senior Fellow
Dr. Emmanuel Pinto Moreira is Senior Fellow at Policy Center for the New South and the Director of the Economic Department of the African Development Bank. He is in charge of establishing a strong department as well as genuinely conducting policy dialogue with policy makers of the region while heavily focusing on new growth strategies, challenges facing middle income countries, fiscal policies and debt reduction strategies. He served previously as regional lead economist for the MENA region at the World Bank. His mission was geared towards first conducting policy dialogue with Maghreb authorities’ and helping them design their vision papers; second, he provided strategic advice on major economic challenges facing these countries, more precisely. Furthermore, Dr. Pinto Moreira ...