Manifesto for an Economic Reset
For too long, we’ve reduced tax administration to its historic role: collecting money for the State. In doing so, we’ve forgotten that it is, by design, the premier “Data Factory / Laboratory” of our Kingdom—the true seismograph tracking the economic activity of every citizen and business.
Looking ahead to the grand AI revolution, the tax authority (the DGI)—perhaps operating through a Data Office led directly by the Prime Minister—is poised to become a true economic catalyst, powered by its goldmine of informational assets. Anonymized, refined, and distributed, this dataset would form the ultimate fuel for our startups operating across financial inclusion, geomarketing, B2B payment delay analysis, GovTech, and PropTech.
Counterintuitively, the real fiscal value isn’t just in the tax collection itself; it’s in the weak signals extracted from the transactional behavior of our businesses and citizens. Once processed and handed over to players with the right tech firepower, this behavior becomes a massive lever for growth: better analysis of the real economy and inter-company cash flows, smarter allocation of resources (subsidies, tax credits, exemptions), a clearer understanding of citizen distrust toward institutions, earlier detection of economic shocks… the list goes on.
The sheer granularity of tax data—and by extension, public spending data (sitting at the Treasury)—would allow for a phenomenal deep dive into the country’s micro-dynamics, handing decision-makers priceless insights. But here’s the catch: all this raw data has to go through the meat grinder of AI and be torn apart, analyzed, and obsessed over by thousands of data-mindset-centric brains.
Beyond these use cases and the specific case of the DGI (which, let’s be honest, is already a frontrunner in data analytics), this is a call for a bold, constructive, and collaborative bridge between the guardians of the State apparatus and civil society in all its forms—especially its economic engines, with a massive focus on our startups.
Shifting from pure enforcement to a data-enrichment platform demands a fresh update to our social contract. The State becomes the guarantor of the data foundation—ensuring top-tier security and privacy—while startups act as value architects, turning those raw feeds into game-changing societal services. Implicitly, it’s a total rethink of the State’s role in the digital economy: positioning itself as an enabler and catalyst for innovation, rather than a mere regulator or data hoarder. It’s data-driven liberalism—Adam Smith’s invisible keyboard.
Imagine an aggressive Open Data framework with regulated, secure access where anonymity isn’t a bottleneck, but a technical protocol—unlocking hyper-granular insights into our real economy while meticulously mitigating re-identification risks.
While allied nations are already embedding autonomous AI agents at the very core of their administrative decision-making, we could forge a similarly visionary path: building a predictive watchtower that feeds this informational fuel straight to our tech ecosystem, supercharging tomorrow’s GDP.
True economic sovereignty doesn’t come from hoarding information. It comes from turning that information into a formidable socio-economic weapon—moving away from historical sedimentation and stepping into dynamic prediction and proactive foresight. You don’t build sovereignty by laying more bricks for walls; you build it by having the courage to throw up more bridges.
I overheard someone mention in conversation recently that Morocco had become the first “open-source” country—a cheeky nod to the relentless wave of cyberattacks targeting our institutions over the past few months.
Flipping that joke on its head, I asked him: isn’t this just fate winking at us? An unmistakable call for civil transparency, repurposed into an economic weapon?
In a techno-complex, hyper-connected, and above all cyber-fragile world, the choice is no longer between light and shadow. It’s between suffering an accidental leak or orchestrating a masterclass in strategic exposure.
Our two biggest hurdles to reaching this vision lie in how rationally we operationalize data privacy laws and national sovereignty.
Economic players constantly feel caught in a vise: they bear the moral responsibility of protecting user data, yet they have to balance velocity and execution in a world moving at breakneck speed. Let’s face it—state secrets aside—our personal and economic lives are already parked sitting on Microsoft, Meta, Google, Salesforce, and now the suffocating duo of OpenAI and Anthropic.
We are staring down a once-in-a-generation opportunity: a Technological Great Reset where all of humanity’s code and collective knowledge comes with a near-zero marginal cost—utterly laughable from a historical perspective. Every single country now has the tools to build whatever it wants using well-trained local talent.
It’s time to dare to unleash our data. It’s time to take bigger risks and power this revival with the ultimate fuel of the future: data.
It’s now or never.