Do Education and Employment Play a Role in Youth’s Poverty Alleviation? Evidence from Morocco

Abstract

In Morocco, youth represent a large segment of society, but there are multiple structural constraints, such as unemployment, particularly among graduates, which exposes them to a great risk of poverty. Using data from the Household Consumption and Expenditure National Survey 2014, this article explores the determinants of youth poverty, focusing on the role of education and employment. Two indicators of poverty are used. The first one is a binary short-term indicator showing whether the young in a given household are poor or not at the threshold of 60% of the median annual expenditure. The second is a poverty measure of the long-term economic status or what is called the Wealth Index, computed using the Principal Component Analysis method. The results from both the logit and the quantile regressions show that being more educated constitutes a rampart against poverty for young people. By contrast, access to employment is not enough to guarantee a decent level of well-being. Moreover, there are no gender differences, but poverty seems higher among rural young and those between 15 and 19 years old compared to those who reside in the urban areas and who are between 20 and 29 years old, respectively. Youth poverty is also significantly associated with family/household characteristics such as education and employment of the other members and household size.