TIRANA, March 7 – The minority 4 percent of Albanian savers continue dominating more than half of total bank deposits, the Deposit Insurance Agency says in an annual report.
Data shows deposits of more than 2.5 million lek (€17,800), which is the insurance threshold set by Albanian authorities, slightly dropped to 516 billion lek (€3.67 bln) at the end of 2015, but yet accounting for 58 percent of total deposits down from 60 percent in the previous couple of years.
These deposits are held by 89,181 depositors with the average deposit at 5.8 million lek (€41,000).
By contrast, the remaining 96 percent of savers hold only 42 percent of total deposits. These fully insured deposits of up to 2.5 million lek are held by about 2 million depositors with the average deposit at only 181,524 lek (€1,291).
Household deposits in 2015 grew by 2.2 percent with savings in the national currency holding a slight advantage of 51 percent.
Starting this year, Albania’s deposit insurance scheme has been extended to also include deposits by the business community. The new legal changes have included some 130 billion lek (€917 mln) in the insurance scheme covering deposits of up to 2.5 million lek (€17,700). The amount accounts for 13 percent of total deposits and 6 percent of the total number of depositors in the Albanian banking system.
Until 2015, only household deposits accounting for 85 percent of total deposits were insured at an amount of up to 2.5 million lek.
Deposits in Albania are insured by the Albanian Deposit Insurance Agency (ADIA), an independent public institution established in 2002 with the task of protecting individual depositors and paying out insured deposits in case of bank failure, with the wider objective of strengthening the stability of the banking and financial system in Albania.
As elsewhere in the region, Albanian banks witnessed substantial panic deposit withdrawals in the face of spillovers from instability of global financial markets, which were compounded by concerns about the health of the Greek banking system in the fall of 2008. Ample liquidity buffers were utilized to meet deposit withdrawals. To boost confidence, deposit insurance limits were raised fivefold to 2.5 million lek (€17,800), and deposits started to recover from the second half of 2009.
The low savings by Albanian households reflect the country’s GDP per capita which is among Europe’s lowest.
Albania’s GDP per capita expressed in PPS, an artificial currency unit that eliminates price level differences between countries, slightly climbed to 29 percent of the EU 28 average in 2014, up from 27 percent in 2013 ranking better only compared to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 28 percent in a 37-country list which includes 28 EU member states, three EFTA members, five EU candidate countries and one potential candidate, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union.
INSTAT reports Albania’s GDP per capita in 2013 was at 466,000 lek (€3,275), up 1.44 percent compared to 2012.
GDP per capita in Albania’s 12 regions ranged from 303,000 lek (€2,129) in the region of Lezha to 338,000 lek (€2,375) to 643,000 lek (€4,519) in Tirana, where the GDP per capita is 38 percent above the country’s average.
