Two Decades of Liberalisation Reforms in Morocco: Successes and Failures

The declared objective of the liberalisation reforms during the 1980s and the 1990s was to accelerate the transformation of pre-capitalist developing economies into ‘modern’ market economies. With this objective in mind, international agencies and donors promoted policies to confine the state to service-delivery and to integrate these economies into the global trade network. After more than two decades, however, developing countries that implemented these reforms are still dependent on a conjuncture of external factors and their growth rates remain stunted. Furthermore, the increasing openness of their markets, as illustrated by the larger percentage of merchandise trade in GDP (gross domestic product), had little impact on income and investment. During the 1980s and 1990s, gross capital formation in Mexico, Morocco, Argentina or Tunisia was reduced (World Bank database: www.worldbank.org ). Growth in income per person fluctuated without paralleling the trend in trade. The questions we need to answer are: Why did the liberalisation reforms fail to make national markets more efficient and the private sector more active? Why did these reforms not increase investments, growth and welfare, as the liberalisation theories had predicted?