Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Monetary Child Poverty in Morocco

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic had a very quick and damaging impact on several economies around the world, including in Morocco. This economy was hit hard with some sectors strongly exposed to the impact on the households and their children. In this article, we built a micro-simulation model and use it jointly with an input-output model to assess the distributional impact of COVID-19 and mitigation measures targeting households in Morocco with a focus on children living in poor households. Our original results show that the crisis has led to a fairly significant increase in poverty, with more pronounced effects in the urban area. Children under 5 years of age and young adults (over 18 years of age) are the most affected. Just over half a million children under the age of 18 would fall into poverty as a result of the pandemic. The mitigation measures put in place by the government and additional measures we designed and simulated further reduce the negative impact of the pandemic. In addition, the number of vulnerable rural population has decreased in both rural and urban areas. However, the two scenarios focusing on mitigation of the effects of the pandemic do not fully compensate for the negative effects of the pandemic in the urban area as opposed to rural areas. When we focus our analysis by age category, the incidence rates of vulnerability decrease to their initial rates for children under 5 years of age and decrease very slightly for youth aged 5 to 17 years at the national level. However, we find that this vulnerability is deeper and more severe even after the implementation of compensatory measures.