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. Flagrant disparities in living standards
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.
It is worth noting that during the last ten years, the climatic conditions significantly affected the economic performance and revenue formation almost one in three years.
As to the distribution of growth fruits, the registered results reveal significant disparities, whether between the socio-economic groups or the urban and rural areas.
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.
In fact, the analysis of the distribution of the added value between such factors as capital and work allows for spotlighting how this fruit is distributed among the different economic players, and revealing the possible inequalities in this distribution.
However, the lack of relevant data in this respect hampers such investigations and the corresponding analyses. Studying the distribution of the added value can be based only on very general indicators.
The results of such a study would then be very limited and the conclusions drawn should be approached with precaution, as the available data do not give a detailed account of the development of the different components of the added value.
A survey on the active population showed that while workers constitute 45% of total work force, their remuneration hardly reaches 34% of the added value of the whole productive system.
However, the development observed during the last ten years shows some distribution dynamics that are more favourable to the work factor.
The proportion of salaries in the overall added value registered regular growth since the turn of the century, to reach 37% in 2005, from 34% earlier, gaining three percentage points in a period of seven years.
Calculated on the basis of nominal data, this result is justified by a slightly sustainable rise of the payroll, distributed comparatively by the evolution rhythm of the added value.
Over the period spanning 1998-2006, the growth of the payroll stood at an annual average of 6.2%, against only 5.4% for the overall added value.
Likewise, the remuneration of the capital factor, approached through the gross operating surplus, increased during the same period at an average rate of 5% a year.
The differential evolution of these income aggregates, being expressed in nominal value, combines the volume effects and price effects, in such a way that it turns out to be difficult to draw definitive conclusions concerning the distribution of growth fruit between work and capital.