Structural adjustment and the peasantry in Morocco: A computable household model

Abstract

A computable nonseparable household (CNH) model approach is used as a tool to analyse, at the microlevel, the impacts of changes in macro and sectoral policies. Nonseparability originates in market failures for some products and factors and in a binding credit constraint. While the results are only suggestive until this type of model is consistently estimated, they indicate the tremendous heterogeneity of impacts across household types. For Morocco, they show that, while higher cereals prices displace resources from livestock to grains, rising prices of animal feeds induce a shift in how livestock is produced toward the use of factors with market failures, in this case child labour for herding and grazing in the commons.