Spatial Analysis of Regional Disparities in Education and Unemployment: The Mediating Role of GDP

Abstract The present paper examines the access to the Moroccan labour market. The latter, no doubt, faces several obstacles such as demographic, economic, educational problems. These factors, lead to disparities and hinder the professional insertion of young graduates. Based on an exploratory spatial analysis, this work will evaluate professional insertion, higher education and economic growth in the regional level. For this regional context, we have chosen the educational factor, which reflects the rate of access to higher education and the degree level of the graduates and the economic factor, which expresses the degree of wealth creation. At the end, a lose look will be given job creation rate for each region. This research adopts a regional exploratory methodology of Geo-referenced Data and confirmatory spatial data analysis techniques to study the link between variables. The global spatial autocorrelation result based on Moran's I statistic confirms the existence of positive spatial autocorrelation and significant clustering of educational inequality, GDP disparity and professional insertion. This study also showed that economic growth mediates the relationship between education and professional insertion. The findings support the ideas of the centre-periphery theory and highlight the functional relationship between what happens at one point in space and what is happening elsewhere. Keywords: economic growth; higher education; professional insertion; spatial analysis; mediating effect JEL Classification C31; R12; P48; R11; R23; A23; I24 Paper type: Empirical Research