Human Resource development: transitioning societies in Morocco

From International Business Wiki

The French colonial Morocco included irrigated land, transportation infrastructure, and investments in capital intensive agriculture for building several dams for irrigation, electricity and exports. Since Morocco was so dependent on foreign markets for products, their lack of capital to finance development led to an economic crisis. This crisis was complicated more by the rapid urbanization, costly territorial expansion into the Western Sahara, rising petroleum prices, and falling phosphate prices in the 1970’s to the 1980’s. But later in the 1980’s the government began their foreign trade reforms to open up the economy, yet these did not help firms becoming more competitive. In the 1990’s the government started to restructure their national economy by making their state enterprises more private. Economics tells us that the past two decades demonstrate an overall guide of growth of GDP that went from 13.9 billion in 1983 to 44.5 billion in 2003, which made the average annual growth rate 3.5%. The population of Morocco has also grown a great deal from 17.1 million in 1975 to 30.1 million in 2003 which is an average annual growth of 2%. The configuration of the major economic sectors illustrates very little change with the service sector accounting for the GDP in 1983 and 2003 for only 52% of it. While this was happening, the industrial sector’s GDP fell from 33.2% to 29.7%, and Morocco’s agriculture, which is where most of the people work, increased as little as 15.2% to 18.3%. The HDI score ranks Morocco as 125th out of 177 contributing countries. The three components they use to measure this are: life expectancy, educational enrollment, and GDP per capita of which they are 109th at $3,810. The economic indicator shows that their per capita gross national income grew from $610 in 1985 to $1,170 in 2002. Agriculture is about half of the workforce in Morocco, and in 2003 Morocco had 40% of its workforce in agriculture, 45% in services, and 15% in industry. Morocco is largely self-sufficient since they have such a high-level of manpower. The unemployment and illiteracy are both major obstacles that Morocco needs to overcome. From 2003 to 2004 unemployment was 12.1% and adult illiteracy was 48.3%. Particularly this hurts Morocco with their competitiveness for the global economy because an educated workforce is essential to try to take any advantage of new and emerging opportunities in the business world. A couple aspects that are helping Morocco are: their free trade agreements including the European Union in 2000 and the United States in 2004, as well as the items they trade such as livestock, leather, automobile parts, electronics, and garments. On the other hand, Morocco is going to face some challenges from new competitors in field crops like cereals and oilseeds.

Reference Cox, J Ben, Khadija A. Arkoubi, and Samuel D. Estrada. "National Human Resource Development in Transitioning Societies in the Developing World: Morocco." 8 (2006): 84. ProQuest. University of Central Florida. 30 Oct. 2007 [[<http://proquest.umi.com.ucfproxy.fcla.edu/pqdweb?index=0&did=980235241&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1193800017&clientId=20176>]]