Participation in the Tontine: Profiles and Determinants, Microeconometric Analysis Applied to Moroccan Data

In Morocco, the banking rates remain generally at unsatisfactory levels, with the exclusion of a large part of population from the formal financial systems due to purely religious reasons as well as its complexity and costs. This exclusion practiced by the modern financial systems leads people to opt for other alternatives, such as tontines, that go along with their religious beliefs and financial needs. The current article aims to analyze the determinants of participation in tontine through mobilizing data from a survey conducted on a sample of 453 teachers of middle school (lower secondary level) in Marrakech. Our analysis highlights three major variables that were rather anticipated (sex, marital status and age) as well as another variable that depends on the teaching subject or specialty of the teachers. This analysis allows, amongst others, to shed light on the substantial costs to the Moroccan economy because of the absence of the Islamic financial institutions and micro-finance, which can deliver socially accountable products to compete the practices of tontine in the informal sector. All that we can say so far in terms of the competition between the two financial systems, informal and formal, is that the first system is the one that expands fundamentally in the Moroccan case.