Policy Center for the New South

The Oxford Handbook of the Moroccan Economy provides a comprehensive and analytically grounded assessment of Morocco’s economic trajectory from 1960 to 2025. Bringing together 53 contributors across 34 chapters, the volume is conceived as a reference work, offering a structured analytical approach grounded in stylized facts, long-term trends, sectoral transformations, and the key public policy challenges shaping the country’s development path. It renews the stock of knowledge on the Moroccan economy by delivering a rigorous, structured, and accessible body of analysis.

Rather than focusing solely on macroeconomic aggregates or measurable social progress, the Handbook examines the deeper drivers of structural transformation, including productivity dynamics, diversification of the productive system, employment quality, technological capabilities, and institutional frameworks. It also addresses core dimensions such as industrial policy, research and innovation, private sector development, and integration into global value chains. The volume highlights Morocco’s growing integration into the global economy and the emergence of new industrial sectors, such as automotive and aeronautics, while critically assessing the limits of this transformation, particularly in terms of domestic spillovers, innovation capacity, private investment, and the creation of quality jobs.

A central contribution of the volume lies in identifying a new phase in Morocco’s development trajectory, moving beyond macroeconomic stabilization and external integration toward higher value-added production, stronger technological capabilities, increased investment in human capital, research and innovation, and a broader diffusion of structural change across the economy.

The Handbook emphasizes that economic development is neither linear nor reducible to a single model. It reflects a cumulative and context-specific process shaped by institutional capacity, policy learning, and structural constraints. In this respect, Morocco is analyzed not as a model to replicate, but as a development experience to be examined in its historical and institutional specificity.

The volume adopts a balanced, evidence-based perspective. It is neither a celebratory account nor a normative exercise, but a rigorous analytical account that captures both the progress achieved and the structural constraints that continue to shape Morocco’s economic development.

As such, it constitutes an essential reference for researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and students seeking to understand the Moroccan economy in its historical depth, sectoral complexity, and contemporary challenges.

This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on Oxford Academic under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.