Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

This dissertation exploits a new nationally representative panel survey of household conditions in order to investigate different aspects of the health-social protection-poverty nexus in present-day Morocco. First, we assess the impact of a policy of `free health care' on access to public hospitals and health-related expenditures. Second, we investigate how shocks related to ill health are related to various coping mechanisms, in particular to the reallocation of labor within the household. Third, we analyze the determinants of the feeling of being poor in the Moroccan population, with a focus on comparison effects. We find that the free health care policy had a moderate, but positive, impact on access to health care among rural households, but a limited impact on health expenditures and no impact on consultation rates for urban household. Moroccan families use a variety of coping mechanisms to cover themselves against the financial shocks linked to illness; in particular, we show that in urban areas, female labor supply reacts positively to illness of the household head, which suggests that low female labor force participation is driven by supplyside reasons. Finally, we find that the feelings of being poor is influenced by the income of various comparison groups, albeit in different directions according to the geographical scale: the income of the comparison group at the neighborhood or village level is negatively associated with the feeling of poverty, while the income at the province level is positively correlated with one's own poverty perception.