Interestingly, mobility between two statuses that characterize different types of jobs and different types of workers such as the salaried and the self-employed are actually very high for men. Over time, there is a slight tendency to improvements for men while for women the tendency seems negative with more women falling into unpaid work. Therefore, men do much better than women and, if we consider self-employment as a less stable employment status than salaried workers, then both genders lost in terms of employment stability. In terms of statutory working time, the situation in Morocco has improved during the 2007-2011 period. For men, the most important transitions have occurred from inactive and unemployed people to full-time workers. For women, the situation is less positive as compared to men. The largest transition flows are between inactive and full-time (but unpaid) work.

**Can we explain jobless growth?** GDP growth and poverty reduction co-existed with stable labor market indicators (employment, unemployment and labor force participation rates) and also significant labor mobility. This phenomenon can be attributed to three main factors: 1) Results of a GDP growth decomposition (Table 1) showed that the bulk of growth can be explained by increases in productivity. This is consistent with the labor mobility analysis that shows overall improvements of workers’ status; 2) The GDP growth decomposition also showed that the second factor of growth relates to changes in the working age population. This is consistent with our other finding that new labor market entrants outpaced job creation; 3) Net bilateral flows between labor statuses are small which means that workers move often in an out of the same sectors, despite the marginal dominance of upwards transitions. This is also consistent with the literature on labor mobility (Jovanovic and Moffitt, 1990).

**What role for economic shocks?** Morocco seems to have been quite successful in coping with the 2007– 2009 global financial crisis partly because of good weather and good agricultural seasons in a country where agriculture still represents an important share of GDP. While this paper did not address causality between economic shocks and labor mobility, we observed remarkable quarter to quarter swings in labor mobility (particularly in rural areas) suggesting that exogenous economic shocks are at work. These shocks are probably more domestic than global and mostly driven by the relative performance of agriculture versus other sectors of the economy. The global financial crisis had its dearest consequences in countries characterized by highly developed financial and banking systems and had smaller effects on economies that remain largely agricultural with little developed financial and banking systems. We should not forget, however, that the years considered saw remarkable changes in global prices which were not induced by the global crisis but heritage of a decade of global price shocks. These price changes may also have affected asymmetrically different markets contributing in this way to labor mobility.

**Some policy implications** . While it is still premature to derive clear policy recommendations, the results presented in this paper provide some new evidence on areas that may have been neglected by the policy maker. We discuss here a few points.

One lesson that we learned from our analysis is that the labor market in Morocco is mobile and not as static as the main labor market statistics would suggest. A higher mobility generally allows for a better labor allocation over time and this should be seen as a positive fact overall. However, mobility across economic sectors and between the public and private sectors is very sclerotic and a sign that industrial policies and public sector reforms are lagging behind and need to be re-thought. If industrial policies and enterprise restructuring were vibrant, we should observe a much higher mobility across economic sectors while a modern public administration should encourage rather than discourage exchanges with the private sector. These are two areas that the policy maker would need to address.

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