Has the Moroccan economy really benefited from the tax amnesty?

While the tax amnesty aimed at regularizing undeclared liquid assets resulted in an injection of 60 billion dirhams into the Moroccan banking system, structural challenges linked to bank liquidity persist.

“The liquidity amnesty resulted in a notable injection of 60 billion dirhams into the Moroccan banking system. In the short term, this initiative contributed to reducing banks’ cash flow tensions, in particular by offsetting the crowding out effect caused by competitive interest rates on the stock market,” explains Mostafa El Jai, academic and economist, quoted by The Economist. Thanks to this influx of funds, tensions on the interbank market were eased from the first week of January, which led Bank Al-Maghrib to reduce its weekly interventions, going from 156 billion to 144 billion dirhams. Another effect of the tax amnesty: 7-day advances, a key indicator of bank liquidity, decreased from 60 to 53 billion dirhams.