OECD Study: Morocco Urged to Boost Public Health Spending Despite Recent Gains

This study is part of a joint project between the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the OECD’s Center for Tax Policy and Administration (CTPA), aimed at analyzing the revenue mobilization capacities of countries to finance their health system, and especially to finance the fight against the three aforementioned diseases.

Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire are pilot countries. Morocco has drawn up a Review of its Tax Policies, following its collaboration with the OECD’s CTPA.

An important part of this note is the weight of the epidemiological transition and the increase in people over 65 between 2020 and 2060, which burden health expenditure, with the risk of disrupting the budgetary balances of the compulsory health insurance funds.

The financing of the increase in public health spending rests on two pillars: improving the design of social security contributions for compulsory health insurance, and making increasing use of tax revenues such as domestic consumption taxes and environmental taxation due to their indirect impact on population health.

The report having been written at the end of 2019, well before the occurrence of the health crisis related to COVID-19, it is therefore important to understand that the results published in this study do not incorporate this essential data, particularly its financing during the management of the crisis.