Poverty, Access to Credit and the Determinants of Participation in a New Micro-credit Program in Rural Areas of Morocco

This paper describes the economic living conditions of the population in dispersed rural areas of Morocco and analyses their response to the introduction of a new micro-credit program. The first section of this paper closely follows the papers of Banerjee and Duflo (2007). It focuses on the comparison of the lives of people of different wealth levels in rural areas of Morocco in terms of consumption, income generation, access to credit and insurance markets, as well as on the environment in which the decisions relatives to these issues are made. The second section of this paper focuses on the determinants of access to micro-credit. Finally, in a third section, the authors assess the role of micro-credit in expanding access to credit, by comparing realised credit transactions in treatment and control villages.