Taxation of agricultural sector in Morocco. An Analysis using a Dynamic Computable General Equilibrium Model

The agricultural sector has always been the subject of a great attention from officials in Morocco as it is a sector that maintains exchange relations with the other sectors and a production sector of the most important Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in the rural and urban areas. Indeed, agriculture accounts for 15 to 20% of the GDP and 44% of total employment. If one adds food processing, its contribution to the GDP and employment passes respectively to 20 and 50%. However, Moroccan agriculture suffers from low productivity, low yields and high logistics costs, in particular in transport, lack of integration between production and market, insufficient development of post-harvest systems, high costs of production, high risks, low coordination within chains, inadequate post-harvest technologies, lack of quality assurance system, and limited expertise in the processing of the agricultural products. For these reasons, agriculture has benefited from huge tax exemptions extended until the end of 2013.The exemption of the sector is supposed to promote, attract and develop private investments in this sector. Effectively, for the past two years, the agricultural sector was the second sector, after the property, having benefited from tax derogations, which represents about 13.4% of total measures identified in 2011. However, it is admitted that these tax advantages are a source of distortions and inefficient allocation of investments and resources towards this sector. The optimal tax theory provides, for this purpose, lessons that are useful for our empirical study.¶ Today, and besides the question concerning the place of the Moroccan agriculture in the economy which led to the design and implementation of the Green Morocco Plan (GMP), it should be noted that the question of its taxation was not as much in the central concerns as evidenced by the Royal orientations to establish an appropriate system to the agricultural sector in 2014 by taking into consideration the social security of the small-holder farmers. The model used is a dynamic multi-sector general equilibrium model. It registered voter in the line of the models built by Shoven and Whalley (1970) like Decaluwé and Savard (2001). Three agents, namely explicitly there the consumers, the producers and the public authorities, are introduced. However, to take into account the foreign trade and more generally the degree of opening of the Moroccan economy, we add a fourth agent to it: the rest of the world.