FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
While Podgorica accepts economic reality and includes crime in official statistics, Tirana continues to nurture a fictitious facade of a clean economy, leaving the gray economy outside of any official analysis...
For the first time, Montenegro has officially included illegal activities such as drug trafficking and prostitution in its GDP (gross domestic product) calculations, following the new ESA 2010 methodological standards required by Eurostat.
With this action, the Montenegrin state is not legalizing crime, but is showing a realistic and honest approach to its economy, recognizing that illegal activities affect, even minimally, the gross national product.
In contrast, Albania continues to maintain a hypocritical stance, where the gray economy, which includes not only prostitution and trafficking, but a range of unregistered activities such as informal employment, unauthorized construction, uncontrolled remittances, and "underhand" services, remains outside of accurate reflection in economic data.
While Montenegro states that crime contributes 0.1–0.2% of GDP, in Albania this percentage would be many times higher, if:
-Drug trafficking and cannabis networks that have operated for years without full control.
-The prostitution economy that, although not legalized, is present in many cities and operates in an organized manner.
-Services without invoices, which include sectors such as construction, tourism, and retail trade.
-Remittances that enter through informal channels, which are not registered by the Bank of Albania and which are often channeled into the informal economy or shadow investments.
-This statistical lack of transparency creates a distorted economic reality. The Albanian state declares economic growth, reduced unemployment, and increased investment, but without taking into account that a large part of the economy operates outside fiscal and legal rules. This harms policymaking, unfairly shares the tax burden, and hinders the fight against money laundering.
Moreover, Albania has an obligation to apply the same methodological standards as Montenegro if it aspires to be part of the European Union. Not including crime in economic calculations does not eliminate crime, it simply moves it to the invisible and unanalyzable terrain for public policies.
And this is not simply a technical issue of statistics. It is a question of institutional morality, a confrontation with reality, and a clear signal to the international community: does Albania have the courage to measure itself as it is, or will it continue to falsify the traces of economic criminality with the excuse that “it is a difficult problem to measure”?/ Pamphlet
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