From Political Independence to Economic Dependence. The Different Trajectories of Stabilisation and Adjustment in Morocco and Tunisia During the 1980s

As regards their recent history, Morocco and Tunisia are often anal ysed as similar cases studies, owing mainly to the lesser importance of oil revenues compared with the rest of North Africa. This simplis tic representation, due in part to the insensitivity of the main inter national financial institutions (IFIs), IMF and World Bank, to cross-country differences, would preclude analysis of some of the factors that marked the first phase of the structural redefinition of the two countries and the onset of these processes in the broader context of the crisis and the redefinition of the international eco nomic system starting in the late 1970s and early ’80s. From this perspective, and precisely because of the profound differences, the Tunisian and Moroccan cases prove to be complementary. As ex ogenous as the crises were, so were the solutions proposed, based on identical macro-objectives and theoretical assumptions, although their relative importance varied between the two. In Morocco, the intervention of IMF and World Bank – even in the context of partially discordant agendas – would be determined by the decision to en sure debt service, in line with the general strategy adopted for the debt crisis of medium-income countries, and would result in a policy of austerity and an investment blockade with lasting effects that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the intervention as early as the ’90s and eventually made pursuit of the liberalisation side of the two institutions’ agenda impossible.