Assessing Benefit Portability for Migrant Workers
Résumé
The portability of social benefits is gaining importance given the increasing share of individuals
working at least part of their life outside their home country. Bilateral social security agreements
(BSSAs) are considered a crucial approach to establishing portability, but the functionality and
effectiveness of these agreements have not yet been investigated; thus, importance guidance for
policy makers in migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries is missing. To shed light on how
BSSAs work in practice, this document is part of a series providing information and lessons from
studies of portability in four diverse but comparable migration corridors: Austria-Turkey, Germany-
Turkey, Belgium-Morocco, and France-Morocco. A summary policy paper draws broader conclusions
and offers overarching policy recommendations.
This report looks specifically into the working of the France-Morocco corridor. Findings suggest
that the BSSA between France and Morocco is broadly working well, with only a few substantive
issues in the area of pensions and the task of implementing access to health care for retired
migrants under the new BSSA effective as of 2011. The pension issues cluster around access to
survivor s pensions in view of civil law differences of addressing divorces and repudiation and the
nonexportability of minimum pension guarantees in line with European Union legislation and
lacking reciprocity. Process issues around information provision in Morocco and automation of
information exchange to speed up benefit processing are recognized.