Morocco’s Competition Council Probes Price Surges in Basic Goods and Materials

In a reference note, the council indicated that it plans to conduct studies on 13 materials belonging to three major groups of basic materials, namely: construction materials (scrap, reinforcing steel, glass, aluminum, copper), and energy resources (gasoline, diesel, fuel and coal), food commodities (durum wheat, different classes of soft wheat flour, nutritional fertilizers, butter, lentils and powdered milk).

According to the council, crisis periods, similar to the one Morocco is going through, provide a fertile environment for the possibility of committing offenses and anti-competitive practices on the main product markets, as some economic actors resort to exploiting this situation and increasing their profit margins.

Concretely, the analysis of the Council’s teams will focus on three axes: an in-depth analysis of the recent evolution of prices at the international level, the search for the main reasons explaining this upward trend, while the third axis deals with the analysis of its repercussions on consumer selling prices at the national level.

The study will take into account a first broader period covering the annual evolution of the last four years 2021-2018 and a second period focused on the first three months of the current year, during which significant fluctuations in consumer selling prices have been observed on the domestic market, the note specifies.