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Research Paper
This paper is the second in a series examining services-led development and global value chain (GVC) integration in the Global South. It applies a three-category analytical framework covering knowledge services (ICT and professional business services), enabling services (transport, logistics, and finance), and local services (retail, hospitality, health, and personal services), to OECD Trade in Value Added indicators. The paper thus provides a structural assessment of Morocco's services sector over 2012–2022, benchmarked against the EU15.
Morocco emerges as the most structurally advanced of the three North African economies examined in this series. Its computer programming and IT services sub-sector has achieved a degree of international market orientation that is the highest in the regional sample and broadly comparable to EU15 levels. This reflects the Casablanca nearshore ecosystem's deep integration with European client markets. Professional and technical services show the most dynamic trajectory in the regional dataset; forward integration into international markets rose steadily and substantially over the decade. The administrative and support services sector stands out for combining strong domestic supply chain embedding with growing international orientation simultaneously, a dual character that makes it the most structurally versatile knowledge services sub-sector in the study. Enabling services, anchored by the Tanger Med port complex, exhibit authentic GVC integration through deep assembly-and-re-export operations, with import content growing markedly over time. The paper further shows that Morocco's most competitive knowledge services sub-sectors—computer programming, professional services, and administrative services—have reached or exceeded EU15 levels of bilateral GVC embeddedness measured by both input sourcing and upstream positioning, making Morocco the only economy in the North African dataset that has crossed this threshold.
The central conclusion is that Morocco's structural challenge is scale rather than quality. Morocco’s leading knowledge services sub-sectors are internationally competitive but collectively too small to generate the spillovers and employment effects that self-reinforcing convergence requires. The big-push logic of this series' Framework Paper applies directly: Morocco possesses the quality foundations of a knowledge economy but has not yet reached the critical mass at which knowledge services spillovers become self-sustaining. The evidence supports a structural policy agenda of deliberate scaling of IT and professional services, combined with containment of a rising public administration share, which risks crowding out productive investment.
