Contenu du sommaire : Varia

This paper studies the impact of labor market policies on unemployment in Morocco. It begins by reviewing the main features of the labor market. It then presents a quantitative framework that captures many of these features ' such as a large public sector, high redundancy payments, powerful trade unions, and international labor migration. The third part simulates the impact of a cut in the minimum wage and a reduction in payroll taxation. The results indicate that these policies may have a significant impact in the short term on open unskilled unemployment. However, they also show that labor market reforms, to be effective in the long run, may need to be accompanied by offsetting changes in the budget to avoid crowding-out effects on private investment

Empowerment and the participation of the population in the decision-making process are nowadays considered as one of the conditions of the success of development programs. Following this objective, this study presents an analysis of the attitudes of the poor towards the double ' political (democratisation) and economic (liberalisation) ' transition process in which many developing countries are engaged today. The study draws on a series of three detailed surveys conducted in 1995, 1998 and 2003 in the capital of Madagascar. The most common belief to explain the difficulty to implement democracy and market economy relies on the idea that people, especially the poor, have a tendency to resist to any reforms. According to this theory, their reluctance is due to their lack of instruction. Our findings show a negative relationship between the level of poverty and the support to market economy. But, on the contrary, the poor are strongly in favour of democracy as the rest of the population. This finding invalidates the hypothesis of a systematic resistance of the poor to change and innovation. Besides, the low level of education or information is not sufficient to explain the attitudes of the poor. The state, in spite of its shortcomings, is considered to be more capable of guaranteeing the equality of opportunities than the market. Finally, those marginalised in politics and the victims of the malfunctions of some institutions tend to have less confidence in the state and to be against democracy. Then, in order to consolidate the democratic process, state institutions must be reinforced to be more reliable, efficient and able to guarantee that the democratic principles are effectively applied.

This study aims to construct a dynamic poverty profile for Cameroon in order to analyze the link between economy growth, poverty and inequality in that country, which has been under structural adjustment since more than 10 years. For poverty analysis, the costs of basic needs (CBN) method is used to estimate poverty lines, and the class of FGT indices developed by Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke (1984) is calculated to study, the incidence, intensity and severity of poverty.The analysis of the relationship between economic growth, poverty and inequality is based both on Kakwani's (1993) static decomposition approach which separately measures the impact of changes in average income and income inequality on poverty, and the dynamic decomposition methods by Datt and Ravaillon (1992) and Kakwani (1997) which break down changes in poverty into growth and redistribution components.The analysis shows that, between 1983/84 and 1996, poverty in Cameroon appears to be a significant phenomenon which affects rural areas more severely than urban areas. This result suggests that rural areas, where the majority of the poor reside, should be the primary beneficiaries of efforts for fighting against poverty. Moreover, the analysis of the link between growth, poverty and income inequality according to Kakwani's (1993) method indicates that in urban areas, the absolute values of expenditure elasticities are clearly higher than unity whatever the poverty measure. Furthermore, poverty elasticities relative to expenditures and to the Gini index are higher in urban than in rural areas thus indicating the higher social fragility of urban areas with respect to economic growth and changes in income inequality. Therefore, the dynamic decomposition results of changes in poverty in growth and redistribution effects confirm the fact that the increase in poverty over the 1983/84-1986 period was due the adverse effect of the contraction in economic activity on growth which was higher than the redistribution effect and thus was more favourable to the poor. The results of this study thus improve our understanding of the nature of poverty in Cameroon and may help in the design of appropriate policies to alleviate this phenomenon.

L'objet de cet article est d'utiliser les développements récents de l'économétrie des panels non stationnaires afin d'examiner les principaux déterminants de long terme du taux de change réel. On considère ici un échantillon de 45 pays en développement, décomposés en trois groupes selon le critère géographique : l'Afrique, l'Amérique Latine et l'Asie. Nos investigations confirment que disposer d'une référence pour juger du degré de distorsion du taux de change réel, n'est pas aussi simple que le laisse penser le concept de PPA. Le taux de change réel est bien au centre d'une dynamique économique et sa valeur dépend des spécificités économiques de chaque pays. Autrement dit, nous ne disposons pas d'une norme fixe et générale mais, pour chaque économie, la trajectoire du taux de change réel est fonction de son niveau de développement, de sa conduite en matière de politique économique et de sa position sur le marché international.