ment high, particularly among youth and women; and there is room to improve regional and social gaps in public services delivery quality and access (e.g. urban-rural, lagging regions, rich vs. middle class and poor). Evidence shows that inequalities increased in 2021<sup>12</sup> and Morocco boasts one of the highest Gini-coefficients in the entire North African region, ahead of countries such as Tunisia and Egypt<sup>13</sup> . Feelings of relative deprivation and social exclusion are particularly strong in lagging regions, which historically stand at the periphery of the Kingdom’s centers of power and economic activity<sup>14</sup> .

Such developments led King Mohamed VI to task a commission of experts and representatives from all parts of Moroccan society to draft a “New Development Model” in 2019. The report, completed and presented to the King in 2021, holds that “despite providing encouraging answers to popular and political expectations in the wake of the 2011 MENA region upheavals and in the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis of trust gradually took hold of the country, fueled by the slowing economic growth and growing social inequalities.”

# **2.2 Survey Methodology**

The analysis presented in this paper is based on an original phone survey of 5,916 adult Moroccans conducted in May and June 2021. Given the COVID-19-linked guidance to limit contacts and the social distancing measures that were in place at the time the survey, the survey methodology consisted of computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI). The survey was translated in Darija (the Moroccan Arabic dialect) and Amazigh and piloted in May 2021 to validate the clarity and the flow of the questionnaire. The quality review of the dataset was done in three ways. First, the survey firm’s software identified outliers in terms of length taken to answer each question as well as suspicious patterns in the answers. Second, the firm called back 2,416 respondents to confirm that they had participated in the survey. Finally, an in-depth call back review of 229 surveys stratified by interviewer was done in close collaboration with the research team to validate the e↵ort of each interviewer.

The survey included 47 questions, with some questions containing multiple sub-questions. The length of the interview meant that it was necessary to provide a monetary incentive to increase the proportion of respondents who finished the survey. This was done through a mobile credit transferred directly to the phone of the participant.

The survey questions covered di↵erent dimensions of social and institutional trust, as well as many possible drivers and correlates of trust. The survey also captured geographic and socio-demographic information of respondents to assess how key variables varied at the 12According to the World Inequality Database (https://wid.world/country/morocco/), the top 10 percent’s share of the total wealth increased from 62.9 percent in 2020 to 63.2 percent in 2021. 13AUC/OECD. 2018. Africa’s Development Dynamics 2018: Growth, Jobs and Inequalities, OECD Publishing, Paris/AUC, Addis Ababa, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264302501-en.

> 14Clementi, Fabio et al. Polarization and Its Discontents: Morocco before and after the Arab Spring. Policy Research Working Paper 9049. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group.

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