THE ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN JOB CREATION: A CASE STUDY OF PROJECTS FINANCED BY THE NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN MOROCCO

Abstract

The National Initiative for Human Development (NIHD) is an approach launched by Morocco in 2005 that focuses on promoting entrepreneurship and income-generating activities to improve the labour market in particular and economic growth in general. Numerous studies confirm the positive impact of entrepreneurship on the labour market (Acs, 1992; Audretsch & Thurik, 1999). The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of the projects launched under the NIHD on the number of jobs created, taking into account their legal status. We adopt the statistical data provided by the service in charge of monitoring the projects supported by the NIHD concerning all the young entrepreneurs supported by the NIHD from 2019 to 2023. The results of this paper confirm the existence of a weak correlation between the total number of projects launched and the total number of jobs created. On the other hand, for each legal status, there is a strong correlation between the number of projects supported and the number of jobs created. This weak overall correlation and the strong correlation by legal status are essentially due to the change in the evolution of the number of projects according to their legal status and to the huge difference between the averages of jobs created concerning each legal status.