TIRANA, March 21 – As debates over the new social assistance scheme continue to lead parliamentary sessions, statistics in the country show that 40 to 50 percent of Albanians live in the limits of poverty, while experts say that the last time poverty levels in the country were really measured was in 2012.
According to scholars of the field, the majority of the country’s population is in the limits of poverty lines and any kind of worsening of their economic situation pushes them in the lower part of the charts.
The government and opposition have spent hours discussing poverty and social assistance funds in parliament in the last couple of weeks, even though it’s been almost six years, experts say, that a proper poverty evaluation in the country was conducted despite it being a legal duty.
Currently, Albania has the lowest income and wage levels per person in the region and, despite the development of tourism and attraction of foreign direct investments lately, it is still the poorest economy in many respects.
Economy scholar Selami Xhepa said the study, titled Survey of Standard Living Conditions, should be conducted every four years in order for the government to create appropriate policies to counter poverty.
“The next survey should have been done in 2016, but was never completed. It is now 2018, almost a six year period since we measured the poverty dynamic. And we mustn’t forget these have been intense dynamics, when the pressure of the global crisis was incredibly strong,” Xhepa told local media.
Among debates in parliament, the opposition blamed the government for under-financing the social assistance scheme that helps this part of society and for misallocation of the funds.
Xhepa, however, said it has been the last four years, and the entire period poverty has not been measured, that Albanians have been the most desperate to go.
According to him, the country is still to define its own minimal living standard, but rather uses the general poverty line as an indicator, provided by World Bank data as $2.5 per day and estimated based on the average income of three Sub Saharan African states with the lowest global income — not a real estimate of the Albanian society.
“If we use more normal poverty criteria, more than half of the population lives in relative poverty. If we use similar criteria as those in Macedonia and other region countries, we see the majority of the population lives in poverty. The second obvious element in our case is that the amount of those living to poverty limits is high, so their vulnerability to falling below the poverty lines are also very high.
The main challenge remains to identify the groups in need — a duty initially in the hands of local leaders who, local media reports, abused with the funds by including people with political ties during election period.
This, according to experts, enabled an undeserving part of the population to gain social assistance, but in the process of undoing this, a big part of society that deserves it got left out as well.
Despite the two points of view, Xhepa said, the social assistance fund is small and those who benefit from it can never leave poverty.
“Unfortunately, even those who are employed are left in poverty, because the employment structure of Albanian consists of poverty employment. The structure is extremely problematic, because employment is not qualitative,” Xhepa concluded.
According to experts, no government so far has gone deep into solving the country’s poverty problems in the long turn – either through studying it or creating proper employment schemes and wage structures.
