Tax Pressure and Macroeconomic Adjustment in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Morocco Using an ARDL-ECM Framework

This paper examines the macroeconomic determinants and dynamic adjustment of tax pressure in Morocco over the period 2000–2024 using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and its associated Error Correction Model (ECM). While the empirical literature on Moroccan taxation remains largely static and descriptive, offering limited insight into short-run adjustment dynamics, this study addresses this gap by providing a dynamic analysis of fiscal adjustment mechanisms in an emerging economy context. The results reveal a mixed order of integration among the variables, justifying the use of the ARDL approach. Although the bounds test yields inconclusive evidence of cointegration, the error correction term is negative and highly statistically significant (−0.833, p < 0.01), supporting the existence of a stable long-run relationship, consistent with small-sample evidence. The estimated speed of adjustment indicates that approximately 83% of short-term disequilibrium is corrected within one year. In the short run, changes in the budget balance exert a positive and marginally significant effect (p ≈ 0.05) on tax pressure. In the long run, inflation has a positive and weakly significant impact, while unemployment shows a negative but statistically insignificant effect. Public consumption and the budget balance display positive but weak effects, suggesting that macroeconomic variables alone provide only a partial explanation of fiscal dynamics. Overall, the findings indicate that tax pressure in Morocco operates as an endogenous adjustment mechanism shaped by both macroeconomic conditions and structural constraints, highlighting the importance of institutional factors in understanding fiscal performance in emerging economies.