The BOA is in process of revising the “Law on the Bank of Albania”. The changes intend to bring the law in line with international standards including improvements in the current legal framework supporting the role of the BoA as a statistical agency.

TRIBOR and TRIBID rates of a range of maturities from o/n to 12 month will start to be published by the first quarter of 2007.

It will be analyzed whether new coefficients need to be applied on freight and smuggled goods and new survey will be conducted on the big importing companies.

Several surveys will be conducted to the households who receipt money from their family abroad in quarterly basis.

Improve the methodology of short–term trade credits. 

Finalize the methods to be used in compiling Albania’s IIP and External Debt; produce extended methodological notes on both.

Compile experimental 2005 and 2006 data on IIP and External Debt;

The BOA plans to broaden scope of data collection through surveys to include Albanian private sector enterprises with large external transactions

Compile quarterly IIP and External Debt data. 

Work on Household Budget Survey (INSTAT) in order to check the plausibility of the estimates done by Bank of Albania on remittances.

Estimate purchases of land and construction financed by unidentified foreign exchange inflows.

Disseminate weekly data on reserves and related liabilities on BOA website

Short-term

Compile and disseminate data on reserves and related items in accordance with IMF's reserves template

Short-term

Advance release calendar will be posted on the Bank of Albania (BOA) website.

Short-term

Publish the methodology on the BOA’s website.

Short-term

The Albanian Ministry of Finance Treasury System (AMoFTS) (oracle financials application parameterized and customized on the Albanian public financial system) is in the phase of testing, training and getting used of the system (November-December 2006); January 2007. MoF plans to go live with the system at the beginning of February 2007.

By using the Albanian integrated centralized computerized treasury system we are going to implement accrual accounting as it is required and provide reports in cash and modified accrual basis in the same time.

In 2007 we will implement the detailed (7 digits) charts of accounts for the general government (central, local. Extra budgetary funds – SSI, HII), and functional classification, approximately with GFSM 2001 classifications.

Adopt the methodology of the IMF’s “Government Finance Statistics Manual , 2001”.

Technical assistance and training needed

See Central Government Operations above

Publish debt service projections.

Establish electronic link between BOA and MOF to facilitate sharing of information between both institutions. Reuters will support to build up the Reuters Auction System in Albania.

Funding being discussed with foreign donors

Upgrade DMFAS program by Debt Sustainability Module (DSM)

Medium-term

(1)     Continue improving the estimates of the non-observed economy activities

(2)     Develop supply and use tables

(3)     Improve GDP exhaustiveness following SNA 93 and ESA 95 definitions.

The technical assistance projects on National Accounts mentioned above ended in 2005. At present, no follow-up is foreseen.

The most critical issues in the near future concern:

(1)     the improvement of labor market statistics, in order to improve the quality of NOE estimation;

SIDA project with Swedish Statistics.

In May 2007 will publish the first new PPI 2005=100 with the new basket of products, enterprises and weights.

In the future we will calculate the PPI for export and import

Participation in the CARDS 2003 project for the West Balkan countries for improvement of External Trade Statistics.

The quality of the information provided in the customs declaration of the General Directorate of Customs (single administrative document – SAD) will be improved

General Directorate of Customs

The census results will improve the basis for the regular estimation of annual population data, including through more accurate fertility rate estimates. They will be published during  2003 in a series of publications.

Short-term

Calculation of population projection through 2015.

Medium-term

The INSTAT also plans to improve timeliness by disseminating the data on its website. The main indicators to be included are being selected.

The INSTAT plans to improve timeliness by disseminating the data on its website.

The INSTAT intends to publish more detailed financial indicators for education and to extend reporting coverage to include post-secondary (level 4) and post-tertiary institutions (level 6).

The data generated by LSMS2002 are being used as input to several on-going initiatives, including the monitoring and updating of the NSSED, the preparation of the second PRSC, the Poverty Assessment, the evaluation of social assistance programs, as well as several other policy studies.  For the first time, the LSMS data allowed the estimation of country-specific absolute poverty lines and consumption-based money metric measures of welfare.  Furthermore, by combining the LSMS with the 2001 Census data, full poverty and inequality maps at the district and municipal levels are being estimated for the country.

A document titled “Poverty during growth” has been prepared by World Bank and INSTAT,and used as an input to Progress report of National Strategy for Economic and Social Development (NSSED). One of the objectives of this document is to estimate an absolute poverty line based on an actual consumption bundle of a sample reference population drawn from the survey.  Towards this end, is proposed and computed a country-specific, absolute poverty line based on the cost-of-basic-needs methodology (Ravallion and Bidani, 1994).  For the estimation of the full poverty line, a food poverty line, or the cost of obtaining a certain minimum amount of calories, is first computed, and then adjusted to include essential nonfood items. The nonfood component was calculated as the average non-food share of those households that spend roughly the same amount for food as indicated by the food poverty line.

Two publications focused in Main findings, monetary and non-monetary poverty and poverty profile are prepared and are available.

Poverty Monitoring Unit to be established in MOLSA.
In order to improve the relevance and use of the information produced, the data, as well as all relevant documentation, will soon be posted on the internet for easier access and use.  Finally, also as part of the dissemination plan, a series of seminars are being planned to discuss and reach consensus on a number of methodological issues including the estimation and use of the poverty line(s) and the welfare measure, as well as to agree on future directions of the survey system. 
INSTAT in collaboration with ISER of University of Essex and World Bank  has  designed  a panel survey on households using 2002 LSMS sub-sample. The Unit of Households Statistics (or LSMS Unit) of INSTAT is in charge of the surveys, part of which will be implemented with the technical assistance of Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) who is in charge of British Household Panel and financed by DFID and World Bank. The panel will be repeated in 2004 and a complete LSMS will be done in 2005. A regular information on households will be established and regular poverty and other key social indicators will be provided on that basis.

Panel results will be available by the end of the year.

Short-term

Technical assistance needed

A full LSMS is in process now. A panel survey will be done in 2006 using a sub-sample of 2005 LSMS

Medium-term

Technical assistance needed