# **2. Youth and gender in the Moroccan labor market**

In the last decade, Morocco enjoyed sustained economic growth with an average annual growth rate of about 5 percent, almost twice its average growth rate during the 1990s. Also, Morocco has achieved substantial gains in education in recent times, with broad access to basic education and improvements in the number of people receiving higher levels of education. Despite these improvements, a large portion of the population is not sharing in the country’s economic developments.

Recent economic growth has not been sufficient to accommodate the growing working age population, leading to high rates of unemployment and low participation rates. According to the official estimates of the Haut Commissariat au Plan (HCP), in 2010 less than half of the population (49.6 percent of those aged 15 and over) participated in the labor market, which constitutes one of the lowest activity rates in the region. In fact, during the decade following 1999, labor force participation rates fell by about 5 percentage points. While inactivity in the labor market is high, unemployment is also high at 9.1 percent, despite a five percentage points decline between 1999 and 2010. In essence, the encouraging gains in unemployment may be mostly explained by the losses in labor force participation with people migrating from the pool of the unemployed to the pool of the economically inactive.

The labor market situation is particularly grim for the youth, women and rural residents. Youth in age 15-29 represents almost a third of the population and among the very young (ages 15-24), unemployment is almost three and a half times as high as compared to the labor force as a whole. Among those who are employed, a majority faces exclusion from the formal labor market and many are underemployed. Women – older as well as the young – face particularly strong economic exclusion. The labor force participation rate of women in 2009 was a third of that of men (25.8 percent as compared to 75.3 percent, HCP 2009), one of the lowest female participation rates in the world. Economic exclusion in Morocco has geographic dimensions as well. Rural areas lag behind urban areas and the rural-urban divide in economic outcomes is one of the highest in the MENA region. These marginalized groups – young people, women and rural inhabitants – constitute the great majority of the Moroccan population.

The increased exclusion of youth, women and rural residents during the growth period of the last decade is puzzling and disquieting. It is puzzling because economic growth was expected to pull some of the inactive into the labor force while it didn’t. It is disquieting because the 2011 Arab spring in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt has been largely fuelled by young people, men and women alike, and many commentators associated these events with persistent lack of labor market opportunities for the youth.

While improvements in growth and labor demand remain compelling prerequisites for improving labor force participation overall, changes in perceptions and expectations can play an important role in terms of female labor force participation. A recent World Bank study (World Bank, 2011) conducted focus group interviews with young people of diverse backgrounds across Morocco and found that an overwhelming majority of both female and male interviewees believed men to be relatively more disadvantaged than women in the domestic labor market. This can appear somewhat counterintuitive 5