Regional Cohesion for Sustainable Growth in Albania

The Government of Albania is preparing the ground for an administrative reform that aims to increase the socio-economic cohesion of the country. The reform will build on the Territorial Administrative Reform (TAR) which started in 2013 and resulted in markedly improved service delivery to Albanian citizens (Institute of Public and Private Policies, 2022). The government seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the economic structure, potential, and interdependencies among its sixty-one municipalities.

The project will analyze the socio-economic structure of the current Albanian municipalities, with an objective of identifying their economic opportunities, strengths, weaknesses, and threats, as well as the economic (labor market and trade) interdependencies among the municipalities. The project will also propose a framework for municipal growth diagnostics – an analysis of the municipal economic opportunities and constraints to growth. To achieve the above, we will analyze granular individual-level, firm-level, and transaction-level data.