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BIRN: Albania's trade deficit breaks historic record, reaches 5.2 billion euros

Politiko 2025-01-18 15:49:49

BIRN: Albania's trade deficit breaks historic record, reaches 5.2 billion

Albania's exports fell for the third consecutive year in 2024, data published by the Institute of Statistics shows. The decline was recorded in all commodity groups, with the most pronounced declines in energy and minerals by 24% and construction materials and metals by 22%. The particularly important group in terms of employment, Textiles and footwear , which has historically had the main share in the country's exports, suffered a decline of 17%.

The decline in exports began in 2023, after a rapid increase during the 2022 crisis, when raw material prices in the international market increased sharply due to the War in Ukraine. But during 2024, exports were almost at the level of 2021. The decline in exports over these two years has many factors, including the decline in sales prices in the international market as well as the strengthening of the lek against the euro, a strengthening that has partly an arithmetic effect (foreign trade accounts are kept in lek and a quantity of goods sold in euros last year is worth less lek today) and also has the effect of losing the competitiveness of Albanian goods in the markets where they are exported.

The most worrying decline seems to be in the Textiles and Footwear goods group , a sector that exported over 1 billion euros of goods last year and was responsible for 28% of all exports. This is a particularly important sector from a social point of view in Albania due to the large number of employees and the fact that fason factories today operate in suburban areas and small towns, where their importance for the local economy is great. Exports of this sector are today almost at the same level as in 2020, the year of the pandemic when a large part of economic activity was paralyzed.

Albania exported a total of 372.6 billion lek of goods. While exports fell, imports rose. Imports reached 894.4 billion lek with a nominal increase of 2.5%. The exchange rate effect in the case of imports suggests that the real growth is higher than that. The Albanian lek has strengthened by about 10% against the euro, the country's main foreign trade currency. In the case of imports, this means that the real growth is about 12%, while in the case of exports, the real decline is not 15.4 but about 5%.

The country's trade deficit reached 522 billion lek or about 5.2 billion euros. This is the highest trade deficit ever recorded in Albania./Reporter.al

 

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