Economic outlook of the Mediterranean countries in the post global financial crisis: SMEs ? SMIs Business surveys and comparative diagnoses with Algeria & Morocco

The international economic and financial crisis is distinguished by its global dimension and in particular its novel mode of contagion. In the absence of decoupling, the crisis, whose origins are confined in the chain of failures in the financial sectors of developed countries, gradually spread to the southern Mediterranean countries via several mechanisms and real transmission channels (trade, remittances and debt service), money (currency and bank credit) and financial (asset prices, external financing, interest rate spreads, decline in foreign direct and portfolio investments, volatility of exchange rates, external public debt, dwindling reserves changes and volatility of financial markets).At the macroeconomic level, detailed studies of the spillovers effects, often negative on the countries concerned, have been developed, particularly those of FEMIP ? FEMISE ? EIB (2010), FEMISE (2009), European Commission (2009) and Berndt. M and D. Ottolenghi (2009). In this report, we complete the arguments advanced by a further reading grid centered on the impact in terms of increasing difficulty of access of SMEs to financing following the banking crisis, sectoral aspects related to the slowdown of foreign trade, deficiencies exacerbated the banking systems and the resumption of inflationary pressures. Similarly, and as the arguments of previous studies is dedicated mainly to macroeconomic aspects, the report refocuses the impact of the crisis on the microeconomic aspects, based on extensive surveys from panels of SMEs in Tunisia Algeria and Morocco.Back technical context is initially developed and permit to distinguish the mechanics of financial crises and their explanatory models drawn from the experiences of systemic banking crises. In particular, the weakening of export sectors in these countries, because of the interdependencies of conjunctures with the euro area will be analyzed by writing models of characterization and dating of business cycles. The analysis of the extraction and synchronization of cycles will also be combined with a study on the nature of the transmission of the external environment in a multivariate approach. On another level, a detailed assessment of the microeconomic effects before and after the financial crisis is then deduced from survey data, and a specification of a model of rationing of bank credit to SMEs in times of crisis. Some areas of thinking about desirable changes in national economic policies will be advanced by focusing the analysis on the scenarios of multilateral cooperation.