Do Services and Transfers Reach Morocco's Poor? Evidence from Poverty and Spending Maps

In the absence of household level data on participation in public programs, spending allocations and poverty measures across regions of Morocco are used to infer incidence across poor and non-poor groups and to decompose incidence within rural and urban areas separately, as well as to decompose improvements in enrollment rates across poor and non-poor children by gender. Programs appear to be well targeted to the rural poor but not to the urban poor. Substantial benefits accrue to the urban non-poor, while benefits largely bypass the urban poor. The analysis also uncovers evidence of impressive progress in primary and secondary school enrollments for the poor, as well as for poor girls since 1994. However, here too, the gains are concentrated on the rural poor. This paper - a product of the Public Services Team, Development Research Group - is part of a larger effort in the group to assess the incidence and targeting of public expenditures