The aim of Sandberg and Binder's new addition to the literature on economic development is to analyse 20 years of the current King's efforts to modernise the economy of Morocco. The authors highlight five areas, notably the financial sector, the telecommunications sector, transportation, renewable energy and tourism, and show how new initiatives have modernised the ways in which these sectors are performing.
These efforts appear very impressive. To name one example, in renewable energy the authors demonstrate that Morocco has been rated as one of the world's top ten performers in the Climate Change Performance Index since 2015, occupying fifth place in 2019, just behind Sweden. The authors attribute this advance to the National Energy Strategy (NES) of 2008, which introduced a series of laws that had as their objective the creation of more renewable energy sources.
Sandberg and Binder highlight changes in the above sectors at great length, but they also identify the key fact that all these modernisation efforts have not been able to significantly alleviate Morocco's income disparities. In fact, one entire chapter, ‘One Morocco for the haves, one for the have-nots’, addresses the question of why modernisation did not lead to any significant improvements in Gross National Income (GNI) per capita. Using the Atlas method, which accounts for inflation, GNI per capita decreased from USD 2,930 in 2010 to USD 2,860 in 2017. To explain why modernising efforts have not yielded any real income improvement, this chapter identifies rampant corruption, and illustrates that protests, including those of the Northern Moroccan Rif region in 2016, are a reaction to the informal and precarious work conditions that prevail outside of the modernising sectors. The Rif region has been the area where widespread anti-government protests have been the most persistent over the past four years.
Despite this acknowledgement of ongoing inequality and dissatisfaction, the ways in which the authors examine many of the modernising strategies often use overly optimistic catchwords, such as ‘leapfrog’, ‘global leader’, ‘cutting-edge technologies’ in order to characterise the Kingdom's modernising efforts. This applies to the automotive sector, which according to the authors ‘has become one of the most successful (industries) in the country’ (60), only for this to be qualified five pages later in that ‘Moroccan firms that aspire to produce for the automakers may not have achieved the success they desire yet’ (65). In other words, in the detailed analysis given, it often appears that the optimistic portrayal of modernisation processes is premature or even misleading.
The example of climate change serves as another case in point. To be able to assess Morocco's claim to global leadership, it would be useful to understand how much renewable energy the country produces, the extent of the introduction of new technologies, and the extent to which carbon emissions are being reduced by those efforts. This is even more so if one wishes to understand why Morocco sits so high in the above-mentioned index. Unfortunately, the authors do not provide any of this. Instead, they present declarations of intent by the King (such as his aim to invest USD 40 billion until 2030), and praise by Ernst & Young, which rates Morocco as the 15th most attractive country for investment in renewables (79). In this way, the authors use declarations as indications of success instead of presenting and independently assessing relevant substantive evidence.
On a positive note, this book contains very detailed and informative data on the above-mentioned industrial sectors, which is likely to be useful to a wide range of students and scholars. More negatively, anyone interested in a critical analysis of the country's development efforts, and a theoretically challenging view of what ‘modernisation’ means in the 21st century, may find him or herself disappointed.
