Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Territorial Development in Souss Massa: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Data

Abstract

This study examines the position of the formal entrepreneurial fabric of Souss-Massa within the Moroccan economy and its internal distribution in the context of advanced regionalization. It addresses a measurement problem: administrative business registrations, the stock of active enterprises, regional production, and announcements of public support describe different objects, whose comparison requires explicit statistical coverage. The study uses the 2024 regional accounts of the High Commission for Planning (HCP), published in 2026, and the national and regional reports of the Moroccan Observatory of Very Small, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises. Comparative observations for 2023 are taken from the same editions. The original HCP data retain all twelve regions, while the entrepreneurial comparison is harmonized across ten territorial units by grouping the three southern regions. The analysis also examines the six provinces and prefectures of Souss-Massa and five dated institutional and journalistic documents. Results show that, in 2024, the region accounted for 6.57% of national GDP, 6.05% of active legal entities recorded in the tax administration database, and 6.13% of legal-entity creations reported by that same source. Business creations increased by 10.97%, while the active stock decreased by 0.57%; these changes cannot be used to infer a business exit rate. Agadir-Ida-Outanane and Inezgane-Aït Melloul concentrated 74.96% of the enterprise stock and 92.74% of the reported value added of covered enterprises. The contribution is a reproducible territorial diagnosis that distinguishes geographically allocated production from corporate accounts assigned to registered headquarters. Announced budgets and support schemes document public policy orientations, without evaluating implementation or impact. Aggregate statistics do not directly measure firm innovation, business perceptions, or the causal mechanisms of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

JEL classification: L26; R11; R12; R58.

Paper type: descriptive empirical research using secondary data.