Tirana, Feb 11 – Albanian Government expressed optimism in relation to the increase in economic crediting by commercial banks in the country, a positive sign this in a face of a global crisis.
Mr. Ridvan Bode, Minister of Finance, during the annual analysis, declared for the media that the government is covering its borrowing needs with foreign financing, therefore giving domestic banks to loan more to the Albanian economy.
“We are borrowing more from foreign banks and help our banks to focus their loans on our economy,” Bode said
“We are taking steps to deposit more foreign currencies (mainly euro) in our banks rather than in foreign ones.”
Bode has expressed hope for the citizens by declaring the depreciation of Lek (Albanian currency) is a temporary issue.
“Every start of the year, depreciation of Lek is a natural and an expect phenomena. January is that period of year when immigrants always bring less money home and remittances are always the lowest. It’s only a matter of days before the market stabilizes again;” he said.
In addition, Bode said that the drop in exports due to crisis impact in some economic sectors such as the mining industry in particular, will be compensated by an increase in electric energy exports. He observed that the export of electric energy will balance up the loss in exports of other sectors.
“We have begun to export energy and this will help to generate the revenue lost as a result of diminished exports in other sectors,” Bode declared.
Continuing his analysis for the performance in 2008 he observed an increase in total revenues by 15% and an improvement in realized investments.
“Revenues increased close to $3 billion, or 15% more than 2007, and we have kept a high performance of completed investments while we have managed to keep foreign debt under control.”
According to Bode, despite financial problems in international markets, the macroeconomic situation in the country during 2008 has been favorable resulting in the highest economic growth for Albania in the last decade.
Unfortunately, Bode’s optimism is not shared by economy experts and economic and financial institutions, international and domestic.
First, according to BoA, bank loaning to businesses and individuals dropped in the 2d half of 2008 and the recent liquidity crisis that hit the Greek banking system revealed the vulnerability of our baking system deriving from foreign capital invested in our banks.
In addition, according to law, financing public investments with foreign debts, excludes domestic businesses from participating in such public projects, denying them a recovering opportunity in from the effects of the global crisis.
Second, it also challenging to understand how the Albanian government intends to export electric energy when the country experiences everyday power shortages and relies on a very amortized power supply system. Even if the government was able to successfully export energy, it is hard to understand how revenues from energy export would help many economic sectors that are losing their foreign markets and have a dim prospect of replacing foreign demand with domestic one.
Lastly, the 9.9% record economic growth in a decade has been challenged by all parties as a freak result deriving from the manipulation of economic data and is far from the real economic growth close to 6%.
