Prime Minister Edi Rama: This is a very special press conference as it is about a demanding and long process of talks and negotiation with the World Bank to determine the new partnership framework, which is indeed the new development program through the WB support for the period between 2023 and 2027 for which an amount of $900 million has been made available and will be distributed according to a number of pillars.
However, what I would like to point out before I give the floor to the WB Country Manager Tirana is that we have already ushered in a new stage of the country’s economic and social life and we have laid all the necessary foundations to make a fresh leap towards meeting our announced targets under the Albania 2030 vision.
I would highlight a set of data to illustrate what I already said: keep in mind the fact that the yearly income per capita has increased by 87.5% or almost twice as much to 6190 euros from 3300 euros in 2013 when we took office. For us not to draw more comparisons with the time we took office, I would instead make comparisons with ourselves and the pre-pandemic crisis and everything that followed.
Albanian exports were valued to a historic high of 4.1 billion euros in 2022. So, Albania that some claim it doesn’t offer job opportunities, that everyone is leaving and only elderly are staying here, it has actually exported 4.1 billion euros in 2022, up by around 57% compared to 2019, precisely thanks to hard work and materialization of all the efforts we have made to support entrepreneurial community and to open up fresh paths for the people to produce and export more.
The country’s agricultural exports alone rose 59% compared to 2019, registering a record value of around half a billion dollars.
The textile and footwear exports also were valued at 1.15 billion dollars.
The annual tourism revenue totaled 2.84 billion euros in 2022, up by 36% compared to 2019, while the tourist numbers jumped to around 7.5 million.
The revenue growth is twice higher than growth in visitor number and this is a very significant indicator. So the number of visitors to Albania rose 36%, whereas revenue increased twice as much, showing the number of the days of their stay and consumption has increased.
The annual revenue from export of IT services totaled 156 million euros in 2022, up by 62% compared to 2019. Last but not least, the influx of foreign direct investment rose 29% to 1.37 billion euros in 2022, recording the highest FDI influx ever registered in the country.
You already know the country’s economic growth in figures, as we have already released such information. Concluding, I would like to again thank the World Bank for its assistance and support over all these years, but I would like to particularly thank the WB Country Manager for this process that we have successfully completed. It is in my memory the most debated process, it is the most in-depth process in every sector and in every detail and it is the most unconventional process that we have completed to really address all those pillars of the country’s social and economic life that will provide fresh impetus to the developing energies.
A total of 4270 enterprises with 100% foreign capital operated in Albania by end of 2019, whereas their number by the end of 2021 rose to 5250 in two years time only. I am not going to elaborate as to where these enterprises come from, as it would take time, but I will give the floor to the WB Country Manager and I would avail myself of this opportunity to also express appreciation to the entire WB staff in Tirana, Albanian and foreign workers, as they have been really very active and they have helped us a lot with their suggestions and the reserves they have forwarded during the process that was concluded with the partnership framework about which the Country Manager will provide more genuine explanations.
WB Country Manager for Albania, Emanuel Salinas: Thank you, Prime Minister! I am pleased to be here on behalf of the World Bank. In fact, we have gathered today for something that we have never had in the history of partnership with Albania.
The World Bank has been working in Albania for 30 years and when we look back we see that a lot has been accomplished through cooperation. Today we wanted to celebrate the new partnership framework with the country that basically defines our contract with you, with Albania; so what does the World Bank commit to accomplish for you, and also for the Albanian population in the next 4-5 years.
In the framework of this partnership, the money will be divided between three main pillars, the first of which is creating more jobs for Albanians, particularly youth and women. We think that much has been done in this regard, but a lot remains to be done. We put the emphasis on the best part- better jobs, because certainly more jobs are being created here. In the future, our challenge is to create better workplaces and to create incentives for people to work here, in order to make the best of their talent here and create incentives for people to stay here and lead a more productive life here in the country.
The second pillar relates to human capital, empowerment and better employment of the human capital. By saying this I mean that we are all worried about the situation of mass emigration from Albania and other Western Balkan countries, but we think that we can together go on with the trajectory in terms of human capital and the productive lives in the country and it is important to strengthen human capital through improving education, health and social protection and public service delivery.
We think that much has been achieved in this regard. We have been working together with the Albanian government in recent years, especially on reconstruction of hospitals and improvement of the quality of health care delivered to the public. However, we think there is scope to do more in the future. As for education, we are very happy to start working to improve digital literacy for children and look forward to other opportunities to do more about this.
The third pillar of our strategy focuses on resilience to the crisis. If we look back to the last three to five years, it seems like every year there is a very big crisis. We know that Albania has been affected by these crises, but we will work with the government to increase resilience, financial resilience of the physical assets, improve infrastructure to reduce the impact of some of these events in the future and improve disaster management in particular.
We are very happy to launch this new partnership framework in a much consolidated way. At the same time, we presented this framework to the board in Washington and introduced 4 new interventions. This is something that has not been done, not only in Albania, but nowhere in any country in the region, in Europe and Central Asia, probably in other regions too. For us, this is evidence of our strong partnership, but also of the strong commitment of the government with which we have collaborated to arrive to this day. We have witnessed firsthand how people have worked long hours; they have worked on weekends, very humbly and very committed to accomplish all this. This is just an initial step only and it represents only approval of the projects and we now need to move forward with the projects’ implementation. But we are really encouraged, we are quite humble sometimes, we are quite aware that we are taking time from our colleagues in the government when we want them to work beyond the working hours, but we recognize and accept the strong commitment of everyone to work at this point.
As the Prime Minister already said, the World Bank will make available 900 million euros to Albania under the new partnership framework, with the first tranche for investment projects estimated at 360 million euros and we expect that another project worth 60 million euros will be approved soon. For you to create an idea about the objects and the scope of these projects, together with the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy we have been working on a project on reinforcing bridges at risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters. There are a number of such bridges at risk and we need to act swiftly to improve their resilience. It is really a huge project and we are inclined to embark on it as soon as possible. There are a number of identified bridges already.
From the very onset, together with the Ministry of Finance we have been working to increase Albania’s fiscal resilience, but also to support economy’s green growth in the future through a fairly significant package of actions and reforms, and we are grateful to the Ministry for their leadership, not only in this intervention, but also in the rest of the programme.
We will work with the Ministry of Agriculture to increase resistance of agriculture to climate change and improve competitiveness of the sector to boost not only the volume of exports, but also the quality of exports to the EU and other markets.
Together with the Prime Minister’s office, the National Agency of ICT and the Ministry of Education, we have designed a project on the digital agenda of the next generation, which includes not only e-learning, but also the provision of digital skills for schoolchildren.
This is an initial batch of projects and another tranche will follow and it will focus on supporting the Vjosa River as a National Park. It is pretty encouraging that the river was designated as a protected area recently and we will work together with the Ministry of Tourism and Environment, as well as the Ministry of Infrastructure and Energy to tackle pollution of the river and to take measures to ensure that the river remains wild in the future.
This is the first batch of the projects, while many other projects are being planned. We think that the sky’s the limit here in Albania, because looking at the level of cooperation here, it is completely unparalleled compared to other countries where the Bank operates and we are grateful to everyone who made this possible.
As I said at the beginning, our commitment to Albania is to deliver on all this in the fastest, least expensive and most efficient way. We also look forward to counting on us when it comes to pledging and delivering the promised resources. Thank you Mr. Prime Minister!
