Breaking the export deadlock. Lessons from the analysis of the Moroccan export profile

Sortir de l'impasse exportatrice. Les enseignements de l'analyse du profil des exportations marocaines

Pauline Lectard and Alain Piveteau

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Abstract: Reducing the study of the structural transformation of a country to that of its export profile leads in fact to retain only the liberal position from the "ideological-political duality" of possible positions on the role of international trade in development. Our perspective in this text is different. It does not aim at any form of reductionism, nor does it a priori privilege a model of industrialization in the name of a necessity given by the presumed truth of international markets. Our approach takes note of the strategic choices made by Morocco in favor of an industrialization through export promotion. It proposes to complete the analysis of the economic and political conditions of Moroccan industrialization by an in-depth study of the profile of Moroccan exports. For that purpose, we return in a first point on the role of foreign markets in the recent industrialization strategy of Morocco and draw up an inventory of the structural transformation (I). We then analyze the transformation of the export structure in support of the criteria of diversification and sophistication (II). We then mobilize data and criteria from the work on "product space" to analyze, in Morocco, the tenuous relationship between the transformation of the export profile and structural transformation (III). Clearly, Morocco has successfully seized the opportunities that productive globalization has offered and, in turn, has consolidated sectoral successes by exporting new, more sophisticated and, although still isolated in the Moroccan productive structure, much more centrally located in the product space (automobiles and electrical machinery). However, the risk of seeing an archipelago of export poles along the country's West Atlantic coast without significant impact on structural transformation seems real in view of Morocco's lack of accumulation of production capacity. Capital accumulation per worker, which is relatively low in Morocco, is struggling to improve over the period. As for total factor productivity, it declined significantly to an extremely low level. This result is related to the slow pace of structural transformation, which, consequently, does not seem to be the result of a simple transformation of the export profile in Morocco.

Keywords: Industrial policy; Exports; Middle-income trap; Exports Diversification; Exports sophistication; Structural transformation; Morocco; Politique industrielle; Exportations; Diversification; Sophistication; Transformation structurelle; Maroc (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-int
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03031002v1
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Published in Noureddine El Aoufi; Bernard Billaudot. Made in Maroc - Made in Monde. Industrialisation et développement, 1, Economie Critique, pp.175-204, 2019, 978-9920-38-211-3

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