Exploring the Impact of Reforms to the Moroccan Vocational Educational System: A Policy Analysis

This Discussion Paper has been presented as a part of the workshop called The Social-Economic Situation of Middle East Youth on the Eve of the Arab Spring, hosted on December 8 - 9th, 2012 at the American University in Beirut. In 1984, Morocco implemented an ambitious reform of its vocational training (VT) system, with the main goal of increasing youth employment by making the system more adaptive to the constantly evolving needs of the labour market. We analyze three types of programs that were implemented as part of these reforms using data on graduates from urban vocational training facilities who completed their studies in 2000. While we find that both the privatization of vocational training and policies designed to encourage small business formation were largely ineffective, we show that participation in a traineeship after graduation has a lasting and strongly positive impact on subsequent labor market outcomes. We provide evidence that these results are robust to correction for selection by estimating the average treatment effect of the programs following Imbens (2004).