It is a fact that the national economy will experience in 2020 its worst year for more than twenty years. And it is not the Minister of the Economy and Finance who will say the opposite.
It is, in short, a quantitative confirmation of the crisis that Morocco is currently going through due to Covid-19 that Mohamed Benchaâboun made in parliament on July 22. The Minister of the Economy and Finance, who was present under the dome of the legislative institution to present the general framework for the preparation of the 2021 finance bill, thus, for several minutes, listed the indicators highlighting Oh how much the national economy has and must continue to be impacted by the pandemic.
A situation which of course, insisted Mr. Benchaâboun, is global, in the sense that according to the latest estimates from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a benchmark in the matter, the world will record a decrease of 4.9% this year. And which for an agricultural country like Morocco -15% of gross domestic product (GDP), good year, bad year, plagued during the current campaign to a fall of 34% of its rainfall, is all the more pronounced.
Thus, we already know that the Kingdom is preparing to experience, as Mr. Benchaâboun recalled, its “first recession since the end of the 1990s”. This recession should at least be, according to the hypothesis adopted by the Saâd Eddine El Othmani government in its amending finance bill (PLFR) – which the parliament finally adopted on July 20 after rereading -, of 5%, but the Minister himself indicated on May 19, still in parliament and more specifically in the Chamber of Advisors, that it is up to 7 points of the GDP which may, by December, evaporate.
With the implications that we know: unemployment first, which should settle at 13% due to the some 305,000 jobs that should be lost -227,000 in the non-agricultural sector and 78,000 in the agricultural sector, and, at macroeconomic plan, a widening of the public deficit, to reach 7.5%, according to the PLFR. Because naturally, due to the drop in economic activity, State revenues will contract: they have already declined, during the first six months of the year, by 12.7 billion euros. dirhams (MMDH), or 10.5% less than in 2019. This will therefore require the public authorities, to get into the nails, to borrow: the public debt could, in the near future, constitute up to 75 , 5% of GDP, compared to 65% currently.
Another consequence, the choice of the El Othmani government to bet everything on bank financing rather than on public procurement so that the public deficit does not sink more than measure, even if Mr. Benchaâboun has not said so openly. . But it was possible to understand it from his presentation, where he emphasized the measures taken by the Economic Intelligence Committee (CVE), precisely set up at the level of his department, to encourage banks to lend. more.
In this regard, he particularly welcomed the fact that the Damane Oxygène guarantee mechanism had made it possible to increase the outstanding loan by MAD 17 billion, for a total of MAD 19 billion since the beginning of the year.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Benchaâboun’s way of doing things will bear fruit, given that the PLFR has continued, despite its endorsement by parliament, to be criticized both on the left and on the right.
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