HCP: Morocco’s Level of Debt Remains ‘Manageable’

Rabat – Morocco’s debt is “manageable” and solutions exist to further mitigate it, said High Commissioner for Planning Ahmed Lahlimi Alami.

Introducing the Exploratory Economic Budget for 2022 recently published by the High Commission for Planning (HCP), Alami noted the fact that many countries, under current circumstances, hold debt, and that Morocco’s debt remains “at levels that are still manageable.”

Despite the debt, the High Commissioner noted that “solutions are possible to reduce the weight on our growth potential or at least innovate in this sense, the model of management.”

Looking for possible solutions to alleviate the debt, Alami praised Morocco’s ambition to set up domestic capabilities to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines, a project which has the “dimension of an emblematic initiative” that fall in line with Morocco’s King Mohammed VI’s royal prerogatives. Not just mere guidelines, the message falls in line with the North African country’s expressed approval of economic sovereignty, the commissioner said.

He also stressed that it is not a matter of “self-sufficiency,” but so that the region can open up to the world and serve as a platform for strengthening regional solidarity and South-South cooperation.

And while the state fulfills a variety of functions, whether historic, constitutional, political, or strategic, for Alami, more resolutely, the state has the role of a developer. Ultimately, the state serves as an “initiator of partnerships with private, national or international capital, local authorities and civil society organizations in joint ventures of all economic or financial dimensions, as part of strategic planning where the requirement of economic reforms and societal feeds on the two dimensions of sovereignty and democracy,” he added.

Meanwhile, the New Model for Development should take advantage of the concept of Morocco’s economic sovereignty to ensure a new cycle of renewed economic growth and social prosperity, said Alami. Such efforts could bring societal, psychological, and economic benefits to the masses, he added.

“The HCP, for its part, should focus its work, in particular, on three reforms in our opinion essential for a reversal of the downward trend that our potential growth, whose pace has dropped from nearly 4.8% on average annually between 2000 and 2008 to nearly 3.3% between 2009 and 2019 to drop to 1.4% in 2020,” said Alami on the occasion.

As a result of the HCP report, the government and various stakeholders can use the report to make policy-related decisions as both a review of national economic growth in 2021 and a forecast of financial performance in 2022.