Morocco’s Quiet Crisis: A Historic Fertility Drop With No Rebound in Sight

Marrakech – A study published this month by France’s Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) places Morocco at the center of a demographic shift unfolding across the Maghreb. Authored by Zahia Ouadah-Bedidi, Ibtihel Bouchoucha, and Soumaya Abdellatif, the report tracks how Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia moved from some of the fastest fertility transitions ever recorded toward a low fertility that, the authors note, “appears durably settled.”

Morocco’s Quiet Crisis: A Historic Fertility Drop With No Rebound in Sight. Marrakech – A study published this month by France’s Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) places Morocco at the center of a demographic shift unfolding across the Maghreb. Authored by Zahia Ouadah-Bedidi, Ibtihel Bouchoucha, and Soumaya Abdellatif, the report tracks how Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia moved from some of the fastest fertility transitions ever recorded toward a low fertility that, the authors note, “appears durably settled.” The starting point was high. The synthetic fertility index across the three countries fell from close to seven or eight children per woman in the 1970s to half that by the early 1990s. What followed, the authors observe, broke with expectations of a single, uniform regional path. Morocco’s trajectory stands apart from...