Publication of the new study on “Morocco, a logistics hub between Europe and Africa?”

Published : Sunday 15 July 2018 - Michel Gonnet, Yves Crozet, Béatrice Majza

 

By talking about a “new border” in its relations with Africa, Morocco clearly expresses its ambition in official speeches. This ambition is what Michel Gonnet, Yves Crozet and Béatrice Majza studied, in a paper available here, by evoking the notion of hub.

In air and maritime transport, specialists talk about a “hub and spokes” model to refer to a logic of concentration and massification of flows towards a transit platform, from where other massified flows leave again. It is a corporate logic, an optimisation that enabled airlines and maritime companies to significantly reduce their costs.

But what does a hub mean for a country? Obviously, Morocco did not develop Tanger-Med or its networks of land infrastructures to watch flows go by. The development of exchanges must be the foundation of a change in the Moroccan productive system.

Thus, following the works carried out by the Coproduction Observatory, this new report examines the dynamic relations between production systems and logistical organisations, that is to say all the operations that regard the management of flow of goods: their transport and storage from the production site to the distribution site, by air, land or sea.

In this respect, Morocco seems to have a favourable geostrategic position. Its advanced status with Europe and its African strategy make of this country “an ideal link to access a broader market” and “an interesting anchor point to physically establish headquarters with a regional, and even continental, ambition”. If Morocco wants to fully play its role of regional hub, it must update its infrastructures faster and develop an integrated logistics system that is adapted to its industrial strategy. But it must also diversify its production and exportations. This is the reason why Morocco’s foreign investments are almost equally divided between Europe and Africa.

Based on these observations, IPEMED wished to examine the transports and logistics sector, as an essential component of Morocco’s position in the structure of exchanges between Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa. This report aims to i) examine the upgrade of the Moroccan productive system, between Europe and Africa, ii) underline the importance of logistics and transports in the organisation and geography of global value chains.

 

 

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