The European Training Foundation (ETF), in collaboration with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (wiiw), have looked at the impact of migration in six countries in the Western Balkans - Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and Albania.
Their newly published report www.etf.europa.eu/en/publications-and-resources/publications/how-migration-human-capital-and-labour-market-interact-4, shows long-standing structural problems in Albania's labour market that includes high levels of unemployment, poor levels of educational achievement and few opportunities for the better educated. The report focuses on the triangular relationships between international migration, human capital formation and the labour market.
Since the start of the post-socialist transition in February 1991, Albania has experienced one of the largest modern-day migratory processes in the world. In three successive wave of mass migration over the past thirty year, so many people have left the country that today, more than 1.6 million Albanians - equivalent to 59% of all people living in the country - now live abroad. The factors that both pushed and pulled Albanians to leave their homeland are still evident and migration continues and is likely to do so in the future.
The size and character of Albanian emigration – heavily slanted towards younger people, and in recent years well-educated cohorts too – poses serious questions for policymakers. The intensity and features of those flows have changed every decade. The first decade was characterised by low-skilled migration, while the second decade saw the maturation of this migration and family reunification. The nature of migration in the last decade can arguably be described as a "brain-drain", the report asserts, with the losses from some professional areas, including doctors and nurses, threatening to create critical shortages within the country.
Albanian migration has been largely driven by high unemployment in the country and dissatisfaction with the quality of education available to enable social mobility. It has been boosted by policies in some destination countries where there has been demand at different times for cheap labour or specific skills - such as nursing and medicine - to fill shortages in those countries.
Early emigration from Albania in the 1990s was largely illegal. Around 600,000 mostly young men left to seek low-skilled, largely informal work in Greece and Italy, driven by poverty, corruption and financial collapse at home. Those two countries still account for the largest portion of Albania's Diaspora - around 75%.
The factors driving emigration have long reflected rising unemployment, which has been at double-digit levels throughout the past three decades, with a rate of 11.5% for 2019 - and more than double that, 27%, for those aged 15-24. But it has also been driven by a labour market characterised by low wages, poor conditions and few jobs for the highly skilled.
In 2019 agriculture accounted for 36% of total employment, industry 13%, construction 7% and services 44% - although many of these jobs are poorly paid. Wages remain low, with no marked increase over the decade to 2019, when the average gross monthly salary was €425m but 40% of workers received only up to the minimum wage of €244.
Within this environment, Albanian education - both general and vocational - is failing its young people. According to PISA, which tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-olds, around 52% of Albanian students in 2018 were functionally illiterate, a fall from 69% literacy in 2009. Scores for other key subjects have also been dropping: mathematics 42%, down from nearly 68% over the same period; and science a 10-point drop to 47%.
Reasons for emigration have shifted slightly - with a rise in family reunion and middle-class parents seeking education overseas for their offspring - but the pace remains high. In the first decade of the 21st century, 480,000 people left - most of them legally to Greece, Italy but also to the EU and North America. Another wave 2011-2019 saw 364,000 go, pushed by high unemployment and positive pull factors in countries such as Germany and the USA (where Albanian migrants record far higher levels of education than the general population).
Intentions to emigrate still remain high among young, educated people with surveys shows the majority of undergraduates intend to emigrate. Those intentions are highest in disciplines of great social and economic value to Albania, including medicine (91% of all students intending to emigrate), informatics (84%), nurses (83%) and engineering (80%).
The risk from what the report states "brain-drain" can be illustrated in many ways, but one striking figure is that between 2013-2018 around 13% of medical staff in the country emigrated, a study found, pointing out that, "the number of those that leave the country each year is equal to or larger than the number of new doctors graduating from the University of Medicine." The same study (Doctors Leaving Albania, Gjypi, SH.A, 2018) found that half of all doctors were concentrated in the capital, Tirana, leaving rural areas short of qualified medical personnel.
A UNICEF report in 2020 also confirmed that highly skilled emigration was depleting Albanian of human resources: doctors, nurses and midwives per 100,000 residents in Albania, which is much lower compared to the EU average (274 doctors in 2017), or even the Western Balkans region, has been downward. In 2000, Albania had 140 doctors per 100,000 residents; by 2018 the figure was 110.
Pull factors from countries seeking medical personnel continue to fuel the flight of doctors and nurses from Albania. "The brain drain from Albania will continue," notes one young Albanian PhD Medical student in Holland, interviewed for the report. "Germany has relaxed recognition procedures for doctors. They accept them from all Balkan countries".
Official failures to ensure young Albanians are properly educated, offer adult and lifelong training, or recognise skills picked up overseas by returning migrants, compounds the adverse impact of mass emigration.
Spending on education - at 3.3% of an already low GDP (around $15 billion in 2019, according to the World Bank) - is low compared to the average in the EU (4.6%) and OECD countries (5.4%). Its GDP per capita of around $5,350 in 2019 is less than a third of the EU.
A shift in the last 15 years away from migration from those with lower and median education and skills towards the higher qualified has changed the quality of migrants, with figures for 2012-2019 showing that around 40,700 people with tertiary education emigrated, accounting for 39% of the cumulative outflow for the period. Those with medium vocational education accounted for 30% and the lower-skilled, 21%. Until 2010, according to the IAB brain drain database, the comparative figures were 22% with tertiary education, 45% secondary, and 33% primary.
The report recommends that "substantial labour market reforms" are needed to alleviate strong migration trends, focusing not only on job creation but also working conditions, wages, job security and career progression. The country also needs to develop mechanisms to monitor emerging skill gaps as a result of migration and implement more systematic measures for the upskilling and reskilling of current workers and adults alike accordingly (e.g. lifelong learning approach). For example, digital and green skills can be prioritized as emerging gaps, which can encourage young people in the medium-term to remain in Albania and work from home for employers in other countries – as it happens in other countries of the region (e.g. Serbia).
Education needs to be better tailored to offer Albanian youth a ‘clear future prospect’, so as to minimise the number of those that see emigration as 'the only solution'. Besides improving education and the scale and quality of available jobs, it is necessary to create an adequate business environment for talented and well-educated youth to tap entrepreneurial opportunities, fully use their qualifications and professional advancement.
Albania should also work with countries that attract migrants to encourage circular migration to ensure human capital benefits are returned to the country.
Attached, you might find both the English and the Albanian version of the report.
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