After “a painful recession in the agricultural sector victim of a historic drought”, Morocco should have economic growth of 3.2% this year, against +1.3% last year, and slightly above the average (3%) from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
With a forecast growth of 3.2% this year, Morocco will do better than Tunisia or Algeria, indicates the direction of economic studies of the French group Crédit Agricole, “first financier of the European economy”, announcing an average growth of 3% in the MENA region and continued inflation in the prices of raw materials and imported consumer products. In 2022, the average growth was 5.4%, due to the considerable increase in the GDP of the oil-producing countries which yielded the price per barrel to more than 100 dollars, and the sharp increase in sales compared to 2021.
This year, the growth of non-oil producing countries should “move to a slowdown for Tunisia, remain relatively stable for Egypt and Jordan and would rise quite vigorously in Morocco”, underlines the study, noting that in the MENA region, the kingdom will do better than Tunisia (oil importing country) whose GDP should decelerate from 2.5% to 2% or Algeria (producer country) whose GDP growth should increase from 3.5% at 2.9%.
The recovery of the agricultural sector, the energy crisis in Spain, France and Italy, the kingdom’s three European partners, and changes in import prices are, according to Crédit Agricole, the three factors that will determine the recovery of Morocco’s GDP in 2023, after settling at 134 billion dollars in 2022. Regarding household consumption and investment, the rate should increase by an average of 3.3% and 3.8% in 2023 for the whole region.
GDP growth in oil-producing Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries is expected to fall from an average of 7.5% in 2022 to less than 3% this year, a slowdown of 8.7% to 3.2% in Saudi Arabia, from 7.0% to 3.8% in the United Arab Emirates and from 4.4% to 2.7% in Qatar. A downward trend that should also be seen in other producing countries with the exception of Libya, which should rebound by +17.0% after the 2022 recession (-13%).
