Economy of Morocco - Economic Inequality

Economic Inequality

The growth pace that the Moroccan economy witnessed since the beginning of the 1998–2007 decade has generated significant progress in terms of national income, employment and living standards. However, the results obtained show considerable disparities in terms of the distribution of the fruit of this growth, whether between the production factors, the socio-economic groups or the urban and rural areas. In fact, the national income grew at an average annual rate of 5.5% during the 1998–2007 decade. This improvement in the national income however seems to be insufficient to face up to the discrepancies in terms of living standards and the scale of deficits at the social level. The real income of the population registered, during the last 10 years, an annual increase of 2.5%, taking into consideration the fluctuations relating the climatic conditions, which mainly affect the most vulnerable populations and their living standards. The national survey on Moroccans' living standards shows that the part of the most well off (10% of the population) in the overall consumption expenses in 2001 reached 12 times that of the most disadvantaged population (10%). Despite the fact that these disparities tend to decrease in urban areas, these data show the importance of the efforts needed to overcome this situation.