RABAT - Measures to reduce Morocco’s dependence on agriculture and boost economic growth are starting to kick in, but high unemployment will still not fall next year, the kingdom’s employment minister said.With 2007 an election year, the ruling coalition of technocrats, conservatives and socialists is keen to show voters that reforms including public sector payroll cuts and more flexible labour rules are beginning to pay off.Evidence things are getting better for Morocco’s millions of poor would also help deter support for the Islamist opposition, which regularly upbraids the government over poverty and corruption and hopes to make strong gains in the polls.According to an official report early this year, the kingdom needs to create 400,000 jobs per year over the next ten years to prevent mass unemployment that would threaten its stability and emerging liberal democracy.Minister for employment and professional training Mustapha Mansouri said that figure was unlikely to be achieved in 2007, when the government expects economic growth of 3.5 to 4 percent, allowing for the creation of 300,000 jobs.“We have a little over 1 million unemployed and we also have around 350,000 people who come to the job market every year,” he told Reuters in an interview.“You need a performance of 5 to 6 percent (growth) to create enough jobs for those people arriving on the work market and to eat a little into the backlog of existing jobless.”For this year, the government sees growth of 7.5 percent and Mansouri said that would allow unemployment to fall to around 8 or 9 percent from 11 percent in 2005.That is worse than the 7.7 percent achieved in the second quarter alone, when the number of jobless fell below 1 million for the first time in 13 years as a strong harvest boosted farm incomes and the construction industry stepped up hiring.Mansouri said that was “quite unusual” as it was calculated at a moment when there was a very high rate of activity.Different reality Official employment data may veer widely from the reality on Morocco’s streets due to a vast informal economy which, according to some estimates, is bigger even than the formal sector.Working out who is employed is not easy in a country full of family-run shops, where factory workers are hired and fired as contracts come and go, makeshift stalls offer fruit or toys and men wander the streets offering to shine shoes or dispose of scrap metal.Morocco’s formal employment sector has its own problems after the education system failed to adapt to a rapidly-changing job market.Young graduates trained for a life in the administration have been left high and dry as public sector payroll cuts barred the door to state employment and weak levels of investment meant too few private sector jobs.“Unfortunately our system of education continued to train generalists who were no longer able to find a place in the productive system,” said Mansouri.He said education was being reformed and the government planned to spend 2 billion dirhams ($228 million) over three years to help Moroccan graduates retrain and 30,000 of them set up their own companies.Some 5,000 have already applied since the scheme was launched a few months ago, he added.The government says it is addressing problems that have put firms off investing in job creation — an ill-adapted education system, poor infrastructure, an opaque and confusing bureaucracy, grindingly slow justice and high payroll taxes.//en.yabiladi.com/topics/morocco-sees-drop-joblessness-44-1415659-1415659.html#msg-1415659 Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:11:53 +0200 Phorum 5.2.15