Foreign Direct Investment’s Trust in Moroccan Competitiveness Poles: A Case Study of the Automotive Industry in Tangier

Abstract

Given the need to diversify its activities to revitalize its economy, and with the ambition of becoming a preferred destination for foreign direct investment (FDI), Morocco has put in place a package of measures and reforms, and opted for a policy Creation of clusters and competitiveness poles based on the local specificities of its territory.

In this context, the government launched the "National Pact for Industrial Emergence" (2009-2015) [and subsequently the "Industrial Acceleration Plan" (2014-2020)] which aims at the installation of the Integrated Industrial Platforms (2IP) which are the Moroccan version of competitiveness poles, dedicated to the Moroccan trades of the world, and offered under incentive conditions to domestic and international investors (FDIs) in order to form a business ecosystem where the interaction between actors requires a relationship dynamic based on trust.

By using a qualitative method based on the case study, we study in this paper, this relational dynamic, on a sample of 15 companies from the automotive industry in Tangier, using the three components of the theoretical grid of Zucker (1986): characteristic-based Trust, relational trust, institutional trust, highlighting the issue of the contribution of trust to the emergence of the business ecosystem Tangier city as an automotive competitiveness pole,

The results obtained clearly show that two of the three components of our reading grid are simultaneously intertwined within our business ecosystem, namely institutional trust and characteristic-based trust with dominance of the first confirming the trust of FDI in Moroccan institutions, and that this trust is fostered by Cultural Specificities of the country.