Measuring the Informal Economy in Morocco: Using the Electricity Consumption Method

Othmane Bourhaba & Mama Hamimida

Published: March 2023

This paper, relying on the electricity consumption method, attempts to both measure the size of the informal economy in Morocco and construct a larger time series dataset for the Moroccan informal economy. We use the Kaufmann and Kaliberda (1996) model to calculate the size of the informal economy over the period 1971 to 2014. The results show that this hidden part of the economy constitutes 41.4% of official GDP in 2014, and also that the informal economy in Morocco shows growth and a positive trend with an average annual growth rate of 2.11% between 1971 and 2014.