Ardian Fullani: The development of economic information sources in Albania
Opening speech by Mr Ardian Fullani, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the seminar "Development
and implementation of business and consumer confidence indices in Albania", Tirana, 2 July 2006.
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The information on the markets and the most recent economic developments may be considered as
the key to success for businesses in the modern times of rapid information technology developments
(it is enough taking a glance at the numerous pages of the Reuters or the space the business news
take to understand such developments). Although, at first, it may not seem to represent the most
critical problem the Albanian businesses are currently facing, such as electricity, informality etc., not
far from now there will be the need of recognizing and analyzing the market in real time, in order to
cope with the challenges of globalization. Considered from a wider aspect, one's country economy
may not attain the international levels if the development policies are founded on a weak real
information basis.
The information on the most recent economic developments and expectations is crucial to the
monetary policy decision-making process of the Bank of Albania. For long, it has been made clear that
the process of maintaining price stability - our main objective - should be a forward-looking one.
Considering the current situation of national statistics, which at times become available with a time-lag
of two years, it is understandable that our duty becomes extremely difficult.
Progress in the field of statistics and in other related fields may take a relatively long time. In the mean
time, our decisions need to be based on sound basis. Under this information gap, one of our solutions
was the conduction of surveys of various economic agents. Four years ago, the Bank of Albania
began the assessment of business confidence index and consumer confidence index. These surveys
are held quarterly with the assistance of INSTAT and involve over 600 businesses of production,
construction and services sectors and more than 1500 consumers. The collected information relates to
the performance of prices, consumption, income, production, employment, investment and many other
indicators, which assist significantly in the monetary policy decision-making process.
Many important steps have been made in this context, aiming at continuous methodological
improvements of indices. To this purpose, the Bank of Albania, with the participation of foreign
experts, has organized various meetings and discussions at a technical level, wherein the surveys
results and analyses, as well as the related issues were presented. Moreover, the Bank has organized
training workshops with INSTAT and their interviewers, with a view to reaching to a high confidence
degree in such key indicators.
Since the beginning, the Bank of Albania has been assisted in this significant process by experts of
the IFO German Institute for Economic Research, one of the leading economic research institutes in
the field of business confidence indices. This assistance was provided by the GTZ office in Tirana,
which has mediated and supported the visit of a number of German experts at the Bank of Albania, as
is the present occasion when we have the pleasure to have among us Mr. Gernot Nerb (IFO), one of
the top experts of IFO institute, for the calculation of business confidence indices in Germany. He will
be holding some presentations related to the use of indices calculated through the conducted surveys,
which help to analyze the real economic and financial developments.
Although so far, the results of our surveys were presented indirectly in our periodical analyses and
reports, as well as in various bank studies, very soon the Bank will publish such results regularly. In
this context, an important preliminary step would be the consolidation of applied methodology in the
calculation of such indices through a professional expertise, as it is the case of IFO. In a second
phase, in close cooperation with the respective chambers of commerce and universities, we are going
to organize several meetings with businesses and academics, wherein we could get suggestions on
the usefulness of these surveys.
Along the same line of enhancing the economic information sources, another initiative undertaken by
us relates to the involvement of the Bank of Albania branches in the collection and analysis of
economic developments in various Albanian regions. So far, there have been conducted several
surveys which have provided very interesting results. Unlike business confidence index, these surveys
aim at getting more complete and continuous timely quantitative information on the situation of labour
market, prices performance, production and on the relationship between businesses and banks. Such
information will be used in the calculation of some important indicators, such as productivity, cost per
work unit, etc., which are often extremely essential to the Bank of Albania work study. Currently, these
indicators are not provided by actual formal statistics.
I wish you a very productive day,
Thank you.