A second lesson from this first analysis on labor mobility is that employment policies need to be more inclusive and target explicitly marginalized groups. The population of Morocco has gained in terms of welfare overall but this progress has occurred via non-inclusive labor market developments. Women have not improved their labor market status and, if anything, they are more dependent on their male counterparts as ever before. Rural women in particular seem to function as a `shock absorber’ for the economy. When the economy is doing well, rural women participate to the labor market in greater numbers but when the economy suffers this group is the first – and often the only group - to be excluded. There is more to be understood about why this happens but a first lesson for policy makers is that policies need to focus also on group specificities, not just employment growth. Leaving rural women behind may accommodate short-term economic shocks but will hamper long-term growth.

A third lesson is that policies designed to increase female labor participation should focus more on how to retain jobs in addition to finding jobs. Perhaps surprisingly, women are as mobile as men. While stock measures such as the LFPR look ‘stable’ for both genders and very grim for women, the actual share of women who move across labor statuses is high and comparable to that of men. Women want to participate and do participate in great numbers. In any point in time the share of women participating is low but the share of women who participate during the year is large. Therefore, many of the women that do participate are unable to hold on to their jobs. There is more to be understood on this question but the paper showed that the policy maker should also focus on better understanding the individual characteristics of women and design policies that enhance those characteristics that would help women retaining their jobs.

A fourth policy issue relates to the chronic underemployment in rural areas. Some of the results presented in this paper would suggest that in times of crisis men replace women. When the economy is weak, rural men working in urban areas seem to go back to rural areas and, by doing so, push women out of the fields and back to inactivity. Vice-versa, when the economy performs well, rural men take jobs in urban areas and they are replaced by women in the fields. These compensation mechanisms suggest that rural areas have an excess of labor force that, we saw, does not transit via unemployment. Job creation of non-farm jobs would seem one of the keys to address this issue, a process that may need specific investments and labor market policies and programs.

Another aspect is the quality of employment and how this may affect the society at large. Improved welfare conditions seem to have come with some costs in terms of employment stability. This is a known effect of the processes of liberalization and privatization. These processes foster growth and employment creation but also render employment more unstable, less predictable and emphasize the divide between winners and losers that has psychological and social implications for workers. This is related to the need for more labor inclusive policies and the gender divide in terms of performance discussed above and something to consider more closely in the years to come.

# **References**

Bhalotra, S. R., (1998), The Puzzle of Jobless Growth in Indian Manufacturing, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 60, issue 1, p. 5-32.

Bosch, M. and Maloney, W.F. (2010) Comparative analysis of labor market dynamics using Markov processes: An application to informality, Labor Economics, Volume 17, Issue 4, p. 621–631 21