Essays on health and poverty in Morocco.

Summary This thesis exploits a new source of longitudinal data on the living standards and conditions of Moroccan households to shed light on the links between health, social protection, and poverty in the case of Morocco. First, we assess the impact of a national free health care program on health care utilization and the financial burden of health-related expenditures. Second, we examine how health shocks affect the distribution of health supply within the household. Finally, we analyze the determinants of the sense of poverty in the Moroccan population, with a particular focus on comparison effects. The main results of this work are that the free health care program had a moderate positive impact on access to health care in rural areas, but no detectable effect in urban areas, nor on health expenditures. We show that Moroccan households use a variety of informal mechanisms to protect themselves against health-related financial risk. In particular, female labor supply in urban areas responds positively to the illness of the household head. Finally, we find that the sense of poverty is related to the average standard of living of the household's reference group, but that this effect varies according to the geographical scale of this group: the average income of close neighbors is negatively related to the sense of own poverty, while that of the province of residence is positively related to subjective poverty.