After such a build up, I am sure you're expecting something enormous. No, the press merely reported that by Administrative dictat the Wali of the Casablanca Morocco governate was suppressing business authorisation for small shops in favor of merely allowing "notification."

Trivial you say?

Not at all.

To open a small business (or any business), the process involve(d/s) getting government "authorisation" (including paying a fiscal fee, a stamp tax) to do so. This obviously create(d/s) no small opportunities for small government officials to extract rents (or in non-economist language, extort non-transparent bribes) from one and all, and above all from the poorly connected. A double rent, since obviously the well-connected can block new market entrants via corrupt officials. What purpose was served in this? Well, it keeps the club to the members certainly.

However, the new Wali has ordered that no longer is there an authorisation process. Rather one merely registers, with no discretion to the official. Pay the "notification" registry fee and away you go.

If this is applied as stated in the Circular, it will go a long way, although sadly only in one governate, to freeing up the economy. Small, trivial things like these authorisations can have an amazingly deadening effect on "weener sized" entreprenurial activity, which in developing economies is the majority of activity.

I close this brief note by noting that the much maligned (among ignorant anti-globo lefties especially) "neo-liberal" agenda from IMF and World Bank have helped motivate these changes. But as so typically in situations where the benefit is not immediately obvious, and no one comes out in the streets, this goes unremarked. Only when cockamamie, well-fare reducing subsidies bring people into the streets do we get comment (and usually ill-informed). I note in closing that my comment on subsidies is not to all subsidies, which sometimes have a place, but cockamamie ones like petrol subsidies.