What measures to fight the modern-day hydra?
26 December 2011
Read by 1684 persons
Interview with Driss Guerraoui on the Economic and Social Council report "Youth Employment"
Unemployment requires mobilization from all components of Moroccan society, as the challenges are enormous.
Heavy files, similar to the labors of Hercules, await the new government: launching legislative work to examine the 34 draft laws provided for by the Constitution, re-examining the finance law, reforming the Compensation Fund whose burden reaches 52 billion DH representing almost a quarter of the State budget and benefiting almost half to the wealthiest, examining the trade deficit, the pensions file where all regimes are in the red, fighting against the rent-seeking economy and corruption, and fighting against unemployment. This last file is undoubtedly the most anticipated by the million young unemployed and the most important as it fuels distrust, frustration and the gap that is growing between the political class and society, between "the legal country and the real country".
Beyond the elections, young "outraged" people everywhere in the world expect measures that allow them to project themselves into the future, to have a horizon. Otherwise, the motto "Without housing, without a job and ... without fear" will be their roadmap to occupy the streets in Tunis, London, New York, Madrid or ... Rabat.
The latest report from the International Labour Organization reports 75 million unemployed people under the age of thirty worldwide. It is becoming increasingly difficult, the report indicates, to find anything else for young people other than part-time or temporary work, while in emerging countries where, due to a lack of compensatory resources, young people do not have the possibility of remaining unemployed, it is poverty at work that is progressing rapidly. " The major trend for these next years of crisis is therefore the precariousness of work, accompanied by a rise in power of the protest movements that "strike the median heart of democracy and contribute to the destabilization of societies".
This issue of combating unemployment, this modern-day hydra, was at the heart of the last session of the year 2011, the tenth ordinary general assembly of the Economic and Social Council. A question which, the report says in the preliminary remarks, concerns "a complex and universal problem, a national priority, whose treatment requires prudence, modesty, pragmatism in the approach, audacity, creativity in the proposals, a problem which requires mobilization of all the components of Moroccan society, as the challenges are enormous..." This employment issue has been and remains at the heart of the mission of Driss Guerraoui, then advisor on social affairs to the Prime Ministry and as Secretary General of the CES, economic researcher, professor at Mohammed V University Rabat-Agdal and author of several books on the agricultural world, on the economy and on young people with "The Morocco of young people", "Africa seen by young people"... Young people anxious about this question of unemployment, a consequence, underlines the CES report, of "the existence of a growth model that is not very job-creating, an education and training system that is poorly or not at all in line with the needs of the economy and society, and inefficient governance of public employment promotion policy and intermediation in the labor market". On this question of intermediation, we will take stock in our tomorrow's editions with the director of ANAPEC, called upon in the report to restructure.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LE MATIN: Unemployment is testing governments worldwide, in developed and developing countries alike. This issue is also at the forefront of the political debate. How can we explain the emergence and importance of this issue that affects all families in Morocco?
Driss Guerraoui: Unemployment, particularly among young people, does indeed affect all countries regardless of their level of development and the effectiveness of public policies implemented to provide lasting solutions. The available data indeed confirms the veracity of this reality, even if it must be admitted that some countries are more affected than others and within these countries certain categories of unemployed are more severely affected than others, namely the unemployed who have left school, people with disabilities, young people from marginalized rural and mountainous areas and long-term unemployed. As paradoxical as it may seem due to the strong impact of the international financial crisis and sovereign debts, in some northern Mediterranean European countries, young people are more affected than those in some southern countries in the area, including Morocco. Indeed, the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds (Le Monde, September 2, 2011) is 46% nationally in Spain, 38.5% in Greece, 27.6% in Italy, 27.2% in Portugal, while it is 17.6% in Morocco (HCP, May 2011), a rate that rises to 31.3% in urban areas.
Let's delve deeper into the issue: what are the impacts of unemployment?
In view of the aforementioned data, unemployment can only be at the forefront of the political debate for at least three reasons. The worsening of unemployment, more than any other economic indicator, has very detrimental impacts on social and political balances, particularly when unemployment affects the most educated categories of society; secondly, unemployment, by contributing to increasing pockets of poverty, marginalization, exclusion and vulnerability, becomes a formidable factor of political destabilization and the weakening of social peace with all the consequences that follow in terms of business climate, economic attractiveness and therefore the positive regulation of investment flows, both national and foreign.
Finally, because the persistence of the unemployment situation and its scale has an impact on general morale, collective psychology and the behavior of actors in society as a whole, the corollary of which in the long term is the crisis of confidence in institutions, that of the social link and living together. This crisis, with its multiple facets, paves the way for the emergence of a culture of despair and the development of atypical forms of protest, even rupture and revolution that result from it (Arab Spring, international movement of the indignant...). All this to say that the issue of youth unemployment is of real and great complexity for all governments in the world. It requires modesty from everyone, of course, but above all a general mobilization of all the actors and driving forces of a nation, audacity and creativity, all built around intelligent and responsible governance free from all forms of deviance.
In the CES report, you speak of the urgency and challenges posed by youth unemployment. What do you mean by that and what is the CES's vision?
In the Council's vision, there are two levels in addressing the issue of youth unemployment, linked to the nature of the reforms and the impacts of the measures to be put in place by the new public employment promotion policy. The first level concerns the structural reforms to be put in place, the results of which can only be produced in the long term. These are either reforms aimed at significantly influencing the economic growth model to make it create more wealth that is better distributed and to build on the basis of promising sectors and jobs with high potential for employment opportunities, as well as on the resources abundantly available in the social and solidarity economy, or actions that will allow in-depth reform of the education and training system, or those that are part of the overhaul of the territorial governance of public employment promotion policy. The second level concerns rather the short and medium term for which there is an imperative need to put in place a national mechanism that can respond to the urgency of addressing youth unemployment, and more particularly the most severely affected among them. It is on this second level that the Economic and Social Council has focused most of its efforts and this is the meaning to be given to the 10 measures proposed by the Council to help meet the challenges posed by youth unemployment to our economy and our society.
Some see the specter of the Great Depression of the 1930s. What is the relationship between economic growth and unemployment?
Fundamentally, you are right, there are causes that recall the Great Depression of the 1930s. Indeed, as in 1930, we are witnessing concurrently two types of crisis, a crisis of underconsumption and a crisis of overproduction, with however, and this is where the difference lies, the development of two phenomena. On the one hand, an "industrial reserve army", to use an expression dear to Karl Marx, which sees its volume increase and with it the impoverishment of large segments of society whose share is expanding as the crisis intensifies and the middle classes who see a continuous destabilization of their social situation. This results in a generalized drop in the purchasing power of entire populations and its corollary, the compression of global demand, which the consumption of the wealthy classes, which has to some extent reached a saturation point, cannot alone compensate for. On the other hand, we are witnessing a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of contemporary capitalism, namely the substitution of the concentration of production by a movement of financial concentration of a more speculative than productive nature, driven by a few large transnational networks of banking, finance and insurance.
What are the consequences and what comparison can be made with the current situation?
The consequence of this movement at the level of the main components of the world economic system is the disconnection between real flows and monetary flows, all on a background of control by these networks over the distribution of economic and political power at both the nation-state and international institution levels, destabilizing, counteracting, or even making, if not impossible, at least difficult, real coordinated and permanent global governance of the crisis. The current global economic disorder that stems from this new reality is largely responsible for the depression we have been observing since 2008. The difference is that the world order of the 1930s depression was an order where a single emerging superpower dominated, namely the United States, and that the current world disorder is evolving in an increasingly global, interdependent system that is becoming multipolar. The deep roots of unemployment lie, among other things, but mainly in this new global reality, and it is this reality that prevents growth from finding a virtuous path based on productive systems that create better-distributed wealth and have a beneficial driving effect in terms of employment. It is from this perspective that changing the growth model and the governance model of our economies and societies is the way forward to structurally and sustainably combat unemployment.
Can the state, as Keynes stipulates, ensure full employment? What, therefore, are the guiding principles of a new public youth employment policy that you advocate in the CES report?
Full employment is a difficult option to achieve today anywhere in the world, even if some states achieve double-digit growth rates allowing them to have tolerable unemployment rates. Hence the need for both economic and social treatment of unemployment. For emerging countries like Morocco, the causes of the phenomenon lie in the existence of a rate of increase in the working-age population that is below the volume of jobs created annually. The reason, according to the diagnosis carried out by the Economic and Social Council, lies in the existence of a growth model that is not very job-creating, an education and training system that is poorly or not at all in line with the needs of the economy and society, and inefficient governance of public employment promotion policy and intermediation in the labor market. Faced with this situation, the role of the state is certainly important to regulate these dysfunctions both as a policeman, producer and strategist, but the roles of the company, the banking system, trade unions, the education and training system, local authorities and civil society actors (families, NGOs working in the field, organizations in the social and solidarity economy) are just as important. It is in this sense and spirit that the CES is convinced that only the general mobilization of all actors could one day make full employment a seriously conceivable option. It is also from this perspective that the Council has made the mobilization of the intelligence and collective genius of all the country's driving forces one of the key guiding principles of any successful new employment promotion policy.
Isn't there a problem of democratization in recruitment, for example, in large public companies? What conclusions do you draw from the study you conducted with the OCP group, which launched a major recruitment and employability assistance campaign?
The initiative launched by the OCP group, which concerns improving the employability of 15,000 young people aged 18 to 30, is enlightening at this level. Indeed, the Group has put in place a system focused on training that meets the needs of the labor market, based on participatory, integrated, partnership-based and coordinated engineering, for the benefit of categories of young people from the Group's implantation regions most severely affected by unemployment, namely young people without schooling and without training, those with schooling without vocational training, those with a vocational training diploma (specialized worker, qualified worker, technician and specialized technician), as well as young people with university training at bac+2 level and above. These young people benefit from training/integration grants, mobilization by the Group of training partners and companies that will host them in integration internships.
This OCP group initiative shows how corporate social responsibility, the civic behavior of firms, the governance of the employability of unemployed young graduates by companies established in the regions and the democratic management of recruitment is one of the ways that can contribute to the territorial promotion of employment. This is an innovation track to be capitalized on within the framework of the advanced regionalization project.
You are the author, with N. Affaya, of the book on "The Moroccan economic elite, a study on the new generation of entrepreneurs". Do you think the government has done everything to encourage young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses?
The survey that served as the basis for this study on the new generation of entrepreneurs in Morocco shows the existence of significant potential for business creation by young people, the rate of which could be multiplied by 10, going from 1000 to at least 10,000, but that the propensity to invest in the private sector remains under the influence of structural constraints linked both to the deficit of entrepreneurial culture and training, the inappropriate nature of existing mechanisms for promoting and supporting young project holders, complex and bureaucratic procedures, access to financing and land due to many deviations, including the persistence of rent-seeking behaviors, clientelism, corruption, producing among young people wishing to start their own businesses a feeling of inequality of opportunity in access to existing opportunities and correlatively a tenacious reality of unfair competition.
In view of your long experience in addressing the issue of unemployment and the limitations of the public service, what lessons do you draw from this experience?
Concerning the experience of integrating unemployed graduates into the public service, three ambiguities must be cleared up, which are in fact also lessons learned. First, this is an experience that does not date back to the advent of the alternating government but rather to the beginning of the 1990s, which saw the creation in 1991 of the National Council for Youth and the Future and the recruitment of nearly 100,000 unemployed graduates mainly in the local public service and secondarily in the central public service. The governments of Si Abderrahmane Youssoufi, Si Driss Jettou and Si Abbes El Fassi together saw the integration into the public service between 1998 and 2010 of nearly 9,000 graduates out of a total of those registered in the Prime Minister's database estimated at around 11,000 (cumulative figure between 1999 and 2009). Second ambiguity, all the data reveals that, given the respective shares of the public and private sectors in total employment, it is the private sector that employs most of the employed workforce with 90.2%, 8.6% for the central and local public service and 1.2% for public companies and establishments. On the other hand, the annual average of budgetary positions created and included in the finance laws between 1998 and 2010 is approximately 15,000 per year (12,000 in 1998 and 23,700 in 2010). Consequently, the true future and therefore the challenge in terms of integrating young people into working life lies in our country's ability to create new economic activities and correlatively new wealth for the purpose of economic and social treatment of unemployment. Third ambiguity, if unemployment mainly affects Arabic literature, Islamic studies, biology, chemistry and physics, which in 2010 accounted for more than 80% of the total number of unemployed graduates registered in the Prime Minister's database, the rate of non-insertion of university graduates from all disciplines combined would be estimated by the observatories of some universities that have them between 8 and 10%. In other words, in view of the foregoing, this is an experience to be considered for the future, in terms of managing this sensitive file in the current dynamic of change. In any case, this experience shows that we are faced with a real deficit of knowledge of the phenomenon, and this is the stage at which it is necessary to begin.
The ILO Director-General, Juan Somavia, declared that "the ILO was ready to support the development process in the Arab world, with the general objective of promoting employment and rights through strong social dialogue structures and institutions". "This is a period where there are many opportunities to seize, with all the creativity and energy that have been released. We need to develop strategies to empower governments, employers and workers in the region to reduce youth unemployment, strengthen democratic governance through freedom of association and collective bargaining, and improve social justice and social protection." In the light of your long experience, what do you think of this statement?
The new social charter adopted by the Economic and Social Council at its November 2011 session shows how much the rights and principles set out by the ILO are at the heart of what our country is undertaking, in accordance with the provisions of the new Constitution and in accordance with the international charters, conventions and treaties to which Morocco has subscribed. It will now be up to all the actors and driving forces of the nation to translate these fundamental rights and principles into major social contracts, as His Majesty the King wished when he set up the Economic and Social Council in February 2011.
Reference points
The 10 measures by main axes of the report on youth employment
Governance of employment promotion and development of intermediation services
• Improvement and rationalization of the governance of employment promotion (National Council for Employment Promotion, National Observatory for Employment and Training, Fund for financing the employment promotion mechanism.
• Expansion and development of the intermediation system and restructuring of ANAPEC into a reformed agency.
• Promotion of self-employment and very small businesses.
• Implementation of a comprehensive mechanism for promoting and supporting VSBs: support desks, mentoring and incubators.
• Development of income-generating activities and micro-activities.
Revitalizing supply through subsidized employment, particularly for long-term unemployed young people
• Implementation of public and social utility employment contracts, in addition to improved CPE and CIP measures.
Improving the employability of young people
• Development of program contracts with operators to encourage short-term vocational training and initial training adapted to market needs (initial higher education, internship and graduate integration departments, behavioral and linguistic training, entrepreneurial training).
• Development of training, adaptation, retraining (à la carte training, training voucher, retraining training...).
• Work-study training through school/company apprenticeship contracts.
• Redesign of procedures and means of managing special training contracts.
Employment supply dynamics through improvement of the regulatory framework
• Improvement of the regulatory framework to boost job creation.
Farida Moha
Lematin.ma
Published on December 25, 2011.
Posted online on December 26, 2011.
Unemployment requires mobilization from all components of Moroccan society, as the challenges are enormous.
Heavy files, similar to the labors of Hercules, await the new government: launching legislative work to examine the 34 draft laws provided for by the Constitution, re-examining the finance law, reforming the Compensation Fund whose burden reaches 52 billion DH representing almost a quarter of the State budget and benefiting almost half to the wealthiest, examining the trade deficit, the pensions file where all regimes are in the red, fighting against the rent-seeking economy and corruption, and fighting against unemployment. This last file is undoubtedly the most anticipated by the million young unemployed and the most important as it fuels distrust, frustration and the gap that is growing between the political class and society, between "the legal country and the real country".
Beyond the elections, young "outraged" people everywhere in the world expect measures that allow them to project themselves into the future, to have a horizon. Otherwise, the motto "Without housing, without a job and ... without fear" will be their roadmap to occupy the streets in Tunis, London, New York, Madrid or ... Rabat.
The latest report from the International Labour Organization reports 75 million unemployed people under the age of thirty worldwide. It is becoming increasingly difficult, the report indicates, to find anything else for young people other than part-time or temporary work, while in emerging countries where, due to a lack of compensatory resources, young people do not have the possibility of remaining unemployed, it is poverty at work that is progressing rapidly. " The major trend for these next years of crisis is therefore the precariousness of work, accompanied by a rise in power of the protest movements that "strike the median heart of democracy and contribute to the destabilization of societies".
This issue of combating unemployment, this modern-day hydra, was at the heart of the last session of the year 2011, the tenth ordinary general assembly of the Economic and Social Council. A question which, the report says in the preliminary remarks, concerns "a complex and universal problem, a national priority, whose treatment requires prudence, modesty, pragmatism in the approach, audacity, creativity in the proposals, a problem which requires mobilization of all the components of Moroccan society, as the challenges are enormous..." This employment issue has been and remains at the heart of the mission of Driss Guerraoui, then advisor on social affairs to the Prime Ministry and as Secretary General of the CES, economic researcher, professor at Mohammed V University Rabat-Agdal and author of several books on the agricultural world, on the economy and on young people with "The Morocco of young people", "Africa seen by young people"... Young people anxious about this question of unemployment, a consequence, underlines the CES report, of "the existence of a growth model that is not very job-creating, an education and training system that is poorly or not at all in line with the needs of the economy and society, and inefficient governance of public employment promotion policy and intermediation in the labor market". On this question of intermediation, we will take stock in our tomorrow's editions with the director of ANAPEC, called upon in the report to restructure.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LE MATIN: Unemployment is testing governments worldwide, in developed and developing countries alike. This issue is also at the forefront of the political debate. How can we explain the emergence and importance of this issue that affects all families in Morocco?
Driss Guerraoui: Unemployment, particularly among young people, does indeed affect all countries regardless of their level of development and the effectiveness of public policies implemented to provide lasting solutions. The available data indeed confirms the veracity of this reality, even if it must be admitted that some countries are more affected than others and within these countries certain categories of unemployed are more severely affected than others, namely the unemployed who have left school, people with disabilities, young people from marginalized rural and mountainous areas and long-term unemployed. As paradoxical as it may seem due to the strong impact of the international financial crisis and sovereign debts, in some northern Mediterranean European countries, young people are more affected than those in some southern countries in the area, including Morocco. Indeed, the unemployment rate for 15-24 year olds (Le Monde, September 2, 2011) is 46% nationally in Spain, 38.5% in Greece, 27.6% in Italy, 27.2% in Portugal, while it is 17.6% in Morocco (HCP, May 2011), a rate that rises to 31.3% in urban areas.
Let's delve deeper into the issue: what are the impacts of unemployment?
In view of the aforementioned data, unemployment can only be at the forefront of the political debate for at least three reasons. The worsening of unemployment, more than any other economic indicator, has very detrimental impacts on social and political balances, particularly when unemployment affects the most educated categories of society; secondly, unemployment, by contributing to increasing pockets of poverty, marginalization, exclusion and vulnerability, becomes a formidable factor of political destabilization and the weakening of social peace with all the consequences that follow in terms of business climate, economic attractiveness and therefore the positive regulation of investment flows, both national and foreign.
Finally, because the persistence of the unemployment situation and its scale has an impact on general morale, collective psychology and the behavior of actors in society as a whole, the corollary of which in the long term is the crisis of confidence in institutions, that of the social link and living together. This crisis, with its multiple facets, paves the way for the emergence of a culture of despair and the development of atypical forms of protest, even rupture and revolution that result from it (Arab Spring, international movement of the indignant...). All this to say that the issue of youth unemployment is of real and great complexity for all governments in the world. It requires modesty from everyone, of course, but above all a general mobilization of all the actors and driving forces of a nation, audacity and creativity, all built around intelligent and responsible governance free from all forms of deviance.
In the CES report, you speak of the urgency and challenges posed by youth unemployment. What do you mean by that and what is the CES's vision?
In the Council's vision, there are two levels in addressing the issue of youth unemployment, linked to the nature of the reforms and the impacts of the measures to be put in place by the new public employment promotion policy. The first level concerns the structural reforms to be put in place, the results of which can only be produced in the long term. These are either reforms aimed at significantly influencing the economic growth model to make it create more wealth that is better distributed and to build on the basis of promising sectors and jobs with high potential for employment opportunities, as well as on the resources abundantly available in the social and solidarity economy, or actions that will allow in-depth reform of the education and training system, or those that are part of the overhaul of the territorial governance of public employment promotion policy. The second level concerns rather the short and medium term for which there is an imperative need to put in place a national mechanism that can respond to the urgency of addressing youth unemployment, and more particularly the most severely affected among them. It is on this second level that the Economic and Social Council has focused most of its efforts and this is the meaning to be given to the 10 measures proposed by the Council to help meet the challenges posed by youth unemployment to our economy and our society.
Some see the specter of the Great Depression of the 1930s. What is the relationship between economic growth and unemployment?
Fundamentally, you are right, there are causes that recall the Great Depression of the 1930s. Indeed, as in 1930, we are witnessing concurrently two types of crisis, a crisis of underconsumption and a crisis of overproduction, with however, and this is where the difference lies, the development of two phenomena. On the one hand, an "industrial reserve army", to use an expression dear to Karl Marx, which sees its volume increase and with it the impoverishment of large segments of society whose share is expanding as the crisis intensifies and the middle classes who see a continuous destabilization of their social situation. This results in a generalized drop in the purchasing power of entire populations and its corollary, the compression of global demand, which the consumption of the wealthy classes, which has to some extent reached a saturation point, cannot alone compensate for. On the other hand, we are witnessing a phenomenon unprecedented in the history of contemporary capitalism, namely the substitution of the concentration of production by a movement of financial concentration of a more speculative than productive nature, driven by a few large transnational networks of banking, finance and insurance.
What are the consequences and what comparison can be made with the current situation?
The consequence of this movement at the level of the main components of the world economic system is the disconnection between real flows and monetary flows, all on a background of control by these networks over the distribution of economic and political power at both the nation-state and international institution levels, destabilizing, counteracting, or even making, if not impossible, at least difficult, real coordinated and permanent global governance of the crisis. The current global economic disorder that stems from this new reality is largely responsible for the depression we have been observing since 2008. The difference is that the world order of the 1930s depression was an order where a single emerging superpower dominated, namely the United States, and that the current world disorder is evolving in an increasingly global, interdependent system that is becoming multipolar. The deep roots of unemployment lie, among other things, but mainly in this new global reality, and it is this reality that prevents growth from finding a virtuous path based on productive systems that create better-distributed wealth and have a beneficial driving effect in terms of employment. It is from this perspective that changing the growth model and the governance model of our economies and societies is the way forward to structurally and sustainably combat unemployment.
Can the state, as Keynes stipulates, ensure full employment? What, therefore, are the guiding principles of a new public youth employment policy that you advocate in the CES report?
Full employment is a difficult option to achieve today anywhere in the world, even if some states achieve double-digit growth rates allowing them to have tolerable unemployment rates. Hence the need for both economic and social treatment of unemployment. For emerging countries like Morocco, the causes of the phenomenon lie in the existence of a rate of increase in the working-age population that is below the volume of jobs created annually. The reason, according to the diagnosis carried out by the Economic and Social Council, lies in the existence of a growth model that is not very job-creating, an education and training system that is poorly or not at all in line with the needs of the economy and society, and inefficient governance of public employment promotion policy and intermediation in the labor market. Faced with this situation, the role of the state is certainly important to regulate these dysfunctions both as a policeman, producer and strategist, but the roles of the company, the banking system, trade unions, the education and training system, local authorities and civil society actors (families, NGOs working in the field, organizations in the social and solidarity economy) are just as important. It is in this sense and spirit that the CES is convinced that only the general mobilization of all actors could one day make full employment a seriously conceivable option. It is also from this perspective that the Council has made the mobilization of the intelligence and collective genius of all the country's driving forces one of the key guiding principles of any successful new employment promotion policy.
Isn't there a problem of democratization in recruitment, for example, in large public companies? What conclusions do you draw from the study you conducted with the OCP group, which launched a major recruitment and employability assistance campaign?
The initiative launched by the OCP group, which concerns improving the employability of 15,000 young people aged 18 to 30, is enlightening at this level. Indeed, the Group has put in place a system focused on training that meets the needs of the labor market, based on participatory, integrated, partnership-based and coordinated engineering, for the benefit of categories of young people from the Group's implantation regions most severely affected by unemployment, namely young people without schooling and without training, those with schooling without vocational training, those with a vocational training diploma (specialized worker, qualified worker, technician and specialized technician), as well as young people with university training at bac+2 level and above. These young people benefit from training/integration grants, mobilization by the Group of training partners and companies that will host them in integration internships.
This OCP group initiative shows how corporate social responsibility, the civic behavior of firms, the governance of the employability of unemployed young graduates by companies established in the regions and the democratic management of recruitment is one of the ways that can contribute to the territorial promotion of employment. This is an innovation track to be capitalized on within the framework of the advanced regionalization project.
You are the author, with N. Affaya, of the book on "The Moroccan economic elite, a study on the new generation of entrepreneurs". Do you think the government has done everything to encourage young entrepreneurs to start their own businesses?
The survey that served as the basis for this study on the new generation of entrepreneurs in Morocco shows the existence of significant potential for business creation by young people, the rate of which could be multiplied by 10, going from 1000 to at least 10,000, but that the propensity to invest in the private sector remains under the influence of structural constraints linked both to the deficit of entrepreneurial culture and training, the inappropriate nature of existing mechanisms for promoting and supporting young project holders, complex and bureaucratic procedures, access to financing and land due to many deviations, including the persistence of rent-seeking behaviors, clientelism, corruption, producing among young people wishing to start their own businesses a feeling of inequality of opportunity in access to existing opportunities and correlatively a tenacious reality of unfair competition.
In view of your long experience in addressing the issue of unemployment and the limitations of the public service, what lessons do you draw from this experience?
Concerning the experience of integrating unemployed graduates into the public service, three ambiguities must be cleared up, which are in fact also lessons learned. First, this is an experience that does not date back to the advent of the alternating government but rather to the beginning of the 1990s, which saw the creation in 1991 of the National Council for Youth and the Future and the recruitment of nearly 100,000 unemployed graduates mainly in the local public service and secondarily in the central public service. The governments of Si Abderrahmane Youssoufi, Si Driss Jettou and Si Abbes El Fassi together saw the integration into the public service between 1998 and 2010 of nearly 9,000 graduates out of a total of those registered in the Prime Minister's database estimated at around 11,000 (cumulative figure between 1999 and 2009). Second ambiguity, all the data reveals that, given the respective shares of the public and private sectors in total employment, it is the private sector that employs most of the employed workforce with 90.2%, 8.6% for the central and local public service and 1.2% for public companies and establishments. On the other hand, the annual average of budgetary positions created and included in the finance laws between 1998 and 2010 is approximately 15,000 per year (12,000 in 1998 and 23,700 in 2010). Consequently, the true future and therefore the challenge in terms of integrating young people into working life lies in our country's ability to create new economic activities and correlatively new wealth for the purpose of economic and social treatment of unemployment. Third ambiguity, if unemployment mainly affects Arabic literature, Islamic studies, biology, chemistry and physics, which in 2010 accounted for more than 80% of the total number of unemployed graduates registered in the Prime Minister's database, the rate of non-insertion of university graduates from all disciplines combined would be estimated by the observatories of some universities that have them between 8 and 10%. In other words, in view of the foregoing, this is an experience to be considered for the future, in terms of managing this sensitive file in the current dynamic of change. In any case, this experience shows that we are faced with a real deficit of knowledge of the phenomenon, and this is the stage at which it is necessary to begin.
The ILO Director-General, Juan Somavia, declared that "the ILO was ready to support the development process in the Arab world, with the general objective of promoting employment and rights through strong social dialogue structures and institutions". "This is a period where there are many opportunities to seize, with all the creativity and energy that have been released. We need to develop strategies to empower governments, employers and workers in the region to reduce youth unemployment, strengthen democratic governance through freedom of association and collective bargaining, and improve social justice and social protection." In the light of your long experience, what do you think of this statement?
The new social charter adopted by the Economic and Social Council at its November 2011 session shows how much the rights and principles set out by the ILO are at the heart of what our country is undertaking, in accordance with the provisions of the new Constitution and in accordance with the international charters, conventions and treaties to which Morocco has subscribed. It will now be up to all the actors and driving forces of the nation to translate these fundamental rights and principles into major social contracts, as His Majesty the King wished when he set up the Economic and Social Council in February 2011.
Reference points
The 10 measures by main axes of the report on youth employment
Governance of employment promotion and development of intermediation services
• Improvement and rationalization of the governance of employment promotion (National Council for Employment Promotion, National Observatory for Employment and Training, Fund for financing the employment promotion mechanism.
• Expansion and development of the intermediation system and restructuring of ANAPEC into a reformed agency.
• Promotion of self-employment and very small businesses.
• Implementation of a comprehensive mechanism for promoting and supporting VSBs: support desks, mentoring and incubators.
• Development of income-generating activities and micro-activities.
Revitalizing supply through subsidized employment, particularly for long-term unemployed young people
• Implementation of public and social utility employment contracts, in addition to improved CPE and CIP measures.
Improving the employability of young people
• Development of program contracts with operators to encourage short-term vocational training and initial training adapted to market needs (initial higher education, internship and graduate integration departments, behavioral and linguistic training, entrepreneurial training).
• Development of training, adaptation, retraining (à la carte training, training voucher, retraining training...).
• Work-study training through school/company apprenticeship contracts.
• Redesign of procedures and means of managing special training contracts.
Employment supply dynamics through improvement of the regulatory framework
• Improvement of the regulatory framework to boost job creation.
Farida Moha
Lematin.ma
Published on December 25, 2011.
Posted online on December 26, 2011.
