[ALBSA-Info] Finally a decent article

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Albania

Getting better
Feb 22nd 2001 | TIRANA
>From The Economist print edition



Meta-morphosis

CURIOUS things happen in the capital of a country that used to be called the 
poorest in Europe, until Moldova took that title. Last year, the opera 
singers in Tirana went on hunger strike, because Albania’s government wanted 
to pay the divas a lot more than the chorus. This year, the problem is the 
zoo: the zoo-keepers survived the dark years of the mid-1990s by snaffling 
the lions’ meat rations and feeding some of the weaker creatures to the 
carnivores. When stocks ran out, the lions were fed with hay: “We have the 
world’s only vegetarian lions,” jokes Edi Rama, Tirana’s mayor.

Mr Rama is one of the reasons to hope that life in Albania will grow more 
conventional in the next few years. A former basketball star, he worked as 
an artist in Paris before returning in 1997 to become minister of culture in 
a coalition government led by Ilir Meta (a former weightlifter) and his 
ex-communist Socialists. Since Mr Rama became Tirana’s mayor in October last 
year, he has set about trying to improve tax collection, stamp out the 
illegal building projects that deface the city’s skyline, clear illegal 
stalls from its few parks and persuade local shops to help mend the potholed 
pavements. If he had his way, he would also get the EU to help with 
education. He dreams of a Balkan university in Tirana, offering courses in 
how multi-ethnic societies can work.

On the wider front, Mr Meta shares Mr Rama’s desire to make Albania more 
democratic and orderly, with a market economy whose rules people actually 
obey. Mr Meta says his main achievement in 14 months as prime minister has 
been to cut crime, clean up the customs service and boost the tax take. Now 
he says he wants a civil service independent of politics. He has brought 
into his government a clutch of young technocrats, some under 30, without 
party-political baggage. At 31, he is too young to be weighed down by any 
himself.

On the face of it, the economy is doing nicely: this year, for the third in 
a row, it should grow by more than 7%. The currency, the lek, has been 
stable; inflation last year was 2%; and remittances from abroad, where about 
a quarter of Albania’s people of working age have gone since communism ended 
a decade ago, are paying for a building boom.

Some of the growth is rebound from the havoc caused by the financial crisis 
of 1997, when half the people in the country saw their savings wiped out as 
a string of bogus pyramid banking schemes collapsed. The economy crashed to 
just about where it had been when the communists bowed out in 1991. Foreign 
investors fled and are only tentatively reappearing: a Greek-Norwegian 
consortium has bought the company that operates Albania’s first mobile-phone 
network, for instance; and a Greek-British one has bought the second 
mobile-phone licence. Few local firms are anything but tiny.

Change will take more than investment. This is a country where the brightest 
and best pile into motorboats for the scary trip across the Adriatic to 
Italy: of the 1m or so Albanians living outside the country, guesses Mr 
Rama, fewer than a fifth left with valid visas. In addition, corruption has 
been the normal route to advancement. Some of the new lot are no angels; but 
most outsiders reckon that corruption has diminished a bit.

Grinding poverty is still pervasive: annual GDP is around $1,000 a head, 
more than a dozen times less than it is in Greece, across the southern 
border. Roads are dire. This winter, power cuts have been repeatedly 
plunging the country into darkness and caused havoc at a giant Turkish-owned 
steel plant in Elbasan.

Even so, with a general election due in June, the coalition has a fair 
chance of winning again; that would be quite a feat, in a region where 
enthusiasm for “throwing the rascals out” has rarely let governments serve a 
second term. Support for the opposition Democratic Party, led by Sali 
Berisha, Albania’s first post-communist president, may be dipping.

If Mr Meta wins, he says he wants to keep on trying to drag his country into 
the wider Balkan market, a process that should be helped by the recent 
restoration of political relations with Yugoslavia. His greater goal is to 
forge links with the EU, which appreciated Albania’s restraint during NATO’s 
war in mainly ethnic-Albanian Kosovo.

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