The direct impact of covid-19 on monetary poverty in Morocco

Abstract

Like the rest of the world, the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted Morocco’s accounts in terms of poverty reduction strategies and programs. It has introduced a degree of mistrust in the achievement of these sustainable development goals. In particular, ODD1 corresponds to the decrease in the proportion of the poor. In this context of crisis, it is quite logical to expect a deterioration of the living conditions of the poorest and the expansion of the poor classes despite the vulnerable class that includes Moroccans who are not poor (economically) but are facing the risk of falling into poverty. The purpose of this article is to analyze the direct short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income poverty in Morocco. As part of a comparative approach, we conducted an empirical study that allowed us to estimate and compare Foster-Greer-Thorbecke’s (1984) pre- and post-COVID poverty indicators in Morocco, following three scenarios of reduction of consumption expenditure of Moroccan households 5%,10%,25%. The analysis of poverty phenomena requires access to individual survey data, to do this we have used the raw data of the national household consumption and expenditure survey 2013-2014, which includes 15970 Moroccan households. The discounting is carried out according to the discount index deduced from the average consumer price indices (CPI) corresponding to the reference periods of the surveys on living standards and consumption of the 2019 estimate date. our empirical results show that the short-term negative effect of COVID-19 on income poverty ranges from 0.7% to 4.9% among Moroccans. Indeed, the incidence of poverty has risen from 1.16% to 4.5% in urban areas and from 4.8% to 12.7% in rural areas, and the number of new poor exceeds 1.7 million Moroccans.

JEL Classification: C1, C3, I32

Article type: Empirical research.