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Morocco’s Experience With Poverty Reduction: Lessons for the Arab World

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Paper
Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center

Morocco’s Experience With Poverty Reduction: Lessons for the Arab World

While Morocco’s poverty rate has fallen by more than 40 percent in the last decade, the country’s leaders must reconsider their poverty-reduction strategy if they want to sustain the positive trend and overcome remaining challenges.

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By Lahcen Achy
Published on Dec 21, 2010

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Despite a lack of significant natural resources, Morocco’s poverty rate has fallen by more than 40 percent in the last decade, with less than 9 percent of its population considered poor. While lifting 1.7 million people out of poverty in ten years is notable progress, Lahcen Achy explains in a new paper that Morocco’s leaders must rethink their poverty-reduction strategy to sustain the positive trend and overcome remaining challenges.

Key policy recommendations:

  • Build human capital. Policy makers should seek to eradicate illiteracy by allocating more human and financial resources to adult literacy programs and encouraging poor families to educate their children.

  • Reduce inequality. Promoting more progressive taxation and better-targeted public spending—along with reinforcing redistribution policies—would reduce inequality.

  • Improve the business environment. Leaders should provide incentives for informal entrepreneurs to join Morocco’s formal economy and encourage them to comply with social and fiscal obligations to employees.

  • Strengthen political and fiscal decentralization. Increasing the participation of non-state actors—including local elected councils and civil society organizations—would help to improve local development policies.

“Despite significant progress in poverty reduction, Morocco faces the persistent problems of high illiteracy, inequality, volatile economic growth, informal and vulnerable jobs, and the uncertain levels of future remittances,” Achy writes. “Policy makers must review the country’s approach for alleviating poverty and take greater advantage of existing strengths to reach a broader spectrum of the population."

About the Author

Lahcen Achy

Former Nonresident Senior Associate, Middle East Center

Achy is an economist with expertise in development, institutional economics, trade, and labor and a focus on the Middle East and North Africa.

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Lahcen Achy
Former Nonresident Senior Associate, Middle East Center
Lahcen Achy
MaghrebMoroccoNorth AfricaEconomy

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

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