Morocco has shown remarkable resilience in the face of various shocks, including the effects of the Al Haouz earthquake, said, on Thursday in Rabat, the World Bank's Country Director for the Maghreb and Malta, Jesko Hentschel.
Speaking at a roundtable organized by the World Bank to discuss the findings of Morocco's new economic monitoring report, entitled "From Resilience to Shared Prosperity", Hentschel highlighted the importance of the reforms implemented by the Kingdom in strengthening the country's external resilience.
These reforms will also help boost prosperity and achieve the ambitious development goals set out in the New Development Model (NMD), he stressed.
For his part, Javier Diaz Cassou, Senior Economist for Morocco at the World Bank, reported that following a marked slowdown in 2022 due to various climatic and commodity shocks, economic growth should pick up to 2.8% in 2023, thanks to a partial recovery in agricultural production, services and net exports.
This recovery should strengthen in the medium term, with real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth reaching 3.1% in 2024, 3.3% in 2025 and 3.5% in 2026, he added, noting that inflation halved between February and August 2023, while food inflation remains high.
He also highlighted the resilience of the Moroccan economy in the face of shocks, explaining that the country had successfully managed the humanitarian response to the earthquake, and put in place an ambitious development plan to unlock the development potential of the worst-hit provinces.
"The earthquake has had devastating human and material consequences, mainly in isolated mountain communities, but it is unlikely to have significant macroeconomic impacts," he noted.
For her part, Federica Marzo, Senior Economist at the World Bank, stressed that a paradigm shift is still needed to enable the economic empowerment of Moroccan women, a crucial step towards achieving the country's lofty ambitions as expressed in the NMD.
