Saad Eddine El Othmani, PM of the Moroccan government, revealed that the government is striving to raise the added value of the national product, by replacing local products with imports, to reduce imports from the current 183 billion dirhams ($18.3 billion) per year to 149 billion dirhams annually ($14.9 billion), which means replacing local industrial products by the end of 2023 with 34 billion dirhams (3.4 billion dollars) of imports. He pointed out that this approach comes in the context of the government's endeavor to confront the economic repercussions of the Corona pandemic.
Al-Othmani explained during a monthly accountability session in the House of Representatives (the first chamber in Parliament) that a set of measures have been put in place to encourage the replacement of locally manufactured products with imports, the most important of which is encouraging export-oriented projects, and setting the period of public support in 3 years in order to raise the pace of production.
He also pointed out that the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Green Economy had launched a publicly available “enterprise bank” as one of the axes of the “industrial revival plan” for the post-Covid-19 phase, which includes 9 sectors: food industry, electrical,, mobility and transportation industries, and the textile sector, leather sector, chemical and quasi-chemical industry, plastic industry sector, mechanical and metallurgical industries sector, investment advantages and industrial real estate. This project aims to keep pace with about 500 productive projects to achieve the goal of compensating 34 billion dirhams from exports at the end of 2023. The ministry has so far reached 634 projects, of which it has retained 259 projects, representing an opportunity to compensate imports of 17.4 billion dirhams (1.74 billion dollars), which is about 51 percent of the specified goal.
Source (Asharq Al-Awsat Newspaper, Edited)
