COVID-19 Devastates Moroccan Economy: Over 130,000 Businesses Close, 800,000 Jobs Lost

It took COVID-19 only 20 days to disintegrate 61% of the national economic fabric, estimated on the basis of CNSS affiliations. An alarming rate, when we realize that 808,199 employees have lost their jobs because of the crisis.

We are far from the estimates of the public authorities who had planned 430,000 job losses by the end of June 2020. Certainly, a battery of measures have been put in place to deal with the emergency, but the situation will largely depend on the curve of the epidemic’s evolution in the country.

With the risk of recession looming over half the world’s population, uncertainty remains at the national level and it becomes legitimate to question the future of the kingdom’s economy, especially since the pandemic has brought down global economic powers.

Flat-rate compensation for employees on layoff, suspension of social security contributions for struggling companies, postponement of bankruptcy filing and corporate income tax payment... These are all anticipatory measures that the Economic Monitoring Committee has sought to put in place in the wake of the pandemic to cushion the boomerang effect.

Optimism remains the order of the day, and as announced by the Moroccan Center for Economic Situation Analysis (CMC), the creation of the Special Fund for Managing the Pandemic, coupled with the solidarity of the population, "could well prevent the bankruptcy of a good number of companies and save jobs".