This episode examines Morocco’s handicraft sector, highlighting its economic importance as a major source of employment and value creation, despite being often overlooked. It presents new empirical evidence showing the sector’s gradual shift toward more formalized SMEs, while exposing its structural vulnerabilities, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis. The discussion emphasizes the need for modernization, better data, and tailored policies to enhance resilience. It also underscores the importance of digitalization and skills development to better integrate the sector into the formal economy.
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AuthorsEdited byJuly 14, 2025Available soon on livremoi. The 2025 edition of the African Economic Report continues in the spirit of previous versions. It presents a broad overview of the continent’s economic evolution and offers insights into Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world. In other words, it explores how Africa navigates the effects of global fragmentation within its regional spaces while pursuing its ambition of continental integration. ... -
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AuthorsNassim HajoujiFebruary 15, 2022Using education and elite configurations as the main variables of analysis, this Policy Paper aims to show how higher levels of popular sector incorporation during elite conflicts, namely in the process of formulating and implementing policies related to education reforms, can negatively affect the economic complexity of developing countries. To do so, it analyzes the experiences of Mauritius and Singapore and links foundational political economy theories, particularly developmental ...
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AuthorsDecember 16, 2021We provide evidence on the direct and indirect effects of trade and infrastructure on women’s participation in the labor force. We use panel data from 91 developing and emerging economies, and examine the impacts of openness to international trade and three indicators of infrastructure (access to electricity, mobile phone subscriptions and internet use) on female labor force participation. Fixed-effects and instrumental variable fixed-effects estimates suggest that both trade and ac ...
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AuthorsSeptember 8, 2021We explore whether improved export sophistication increases women’s participation in wage employment. Using panel data from a large group of developing and emerging economies, and Fixed-effects and Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators, we find that export sophistication has significant and mostly positive effects on women’s participation in paid employment in all regions, but these effects are nonlinear, since they become positive only after a threshold level of sophistica ...
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AuthorsDecember 14, 2020This article has originally been published on OECD Development matter platform Many donor countries seem eager to see middle-income countries (MICs) “master out” and graduate to a non-client status in multilateral development institutions before fully achieving their development potential. We argue that such institutions can still significantly contribute to the sustainable development of MICs, while also seizing many benefits from this relationship (Middle income countries and mul ... -
AuthorsJanuary 9, 2020The main goal of this paper is to address an important question that arises from the interaction between increased participation in international trade, labor markets, and gender inequality; namely, the impact of trade liberalization on women’s access to wage employment in the non-agricultural sector. We empirically address this question by performing fixedeffects and GMM estimations on panel data from a large group of developing economies, and tracing the impact of trade on women’s ...
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