Taxation of the Digital Economy, Tax Revenues and Economic Growth in Morocco: An ARDL Analysis

Résumé

 Taxation of the digital economy is a crucial and increasingly debated issue worldwide, particularly in emerging economies such as Morocco, where the rapid growth of internet penetration and digital services has raised new challenges for tax administrations. Traditional tax systems, designed for physically anchored economic activities, struggle to capture value generated by dematerialized transactions, cross-border digital platforms, and location-independent business models. Against this background, understanding how the development of the digital economy interacts with tax revenue mobilization and economic growth becomes essential for designing appropriate fiscal policy. This study examines the effect of internet use, taken as a proxy for the penetration of the digital economy, together with tax revenues and research and development (R&D) expenditure, on economic growth in Morocco. An Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach is applied to annual data collected from the World Bank for the period 2003-2023, using Eviews v.10, given its suitability for examining both short-run and long-run relationships among variables with mixed orders of integration. The results show that, in the long run, internet use and tax revenues have a positive and statistically significant effect on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whereas R&D expenditure exhibits a negative long-run effect, which may reflect the time lag typically required for research investments to translate into productivity gains. In the short run, tax revenues also exert a significant positive effect on GDP, while internet use shows a negative short-run relationship, consistent with the upfront costs of digital infrastructure investment preceding productivity returns. These findings suggest that digitalization and effective tax revenue mobilization can jointly support economic growth in Morocco, provided that tax policy carefully balances revenue generation with incentives for innovation and continued investment in the digital economy, without discouraging businesses from adopting digital technologies.