ACQJ editorial office
An audit by the Supreme State Audit warns that the country is entering a deep phase of demographic aging without any national strategy to guide the state's response, and that the government's main instrument to encourage births, the baby bonus, has not changed any aspect of the alarming situation in which the country finds itself.
The Supreme Audit Office (SAO) has recently published the conclusions of its audit of the government's comprehensive plans for population aging. The most striking finding is not a single figure, but a contrast: the more Albania's demographic indicators worsen, the less coherent the policies that are supposed to respond to them.
The report states unequivocally that the country “does not have a single strategic document that addresses the phenomenon of population aging in an integrated manner.” Instead, the issue is addressed piecemeal, through separate strategies for employment, social protection, health, youth and migration, documents that, according to the audit, are not coordinated with each other, fail to produce results and often contradict each other.
This lack of strategy is not simply an administrative issue. It comes at a time when Albania's demographic numbers have been in steady decline for more than a decade. The birth rate has fallen 72% since 1990.
The median age of the population has increased from 32.6 years in 2011 to 44.3 years in 2025, a rapid change even by European standards, where societies typically age more slowly. Natural increase, that is, the difference between births and deaths, has decreased by 88.3% in just a decade, from 10,297 in 2015 to 1,208 in 2024. At the same time, negative net migration has doubled between 2018 and 2022.
Fewer births, more departures, older population.
It is precisely in this context that the failure of the baby bonus takes on the greatest weight. It is the government's most visible instrument to encourage families to have children, and the SAI directly states that it "has had no impact on changing current trends in terms of increasing the number of births."
Instead of funding for this scheme increasing in response to the fertility crisis, it has fallen, while the number of births in the country reached a historic low in 2024.
The contrast between rhetoric and results is also evident in other indicators. Families with dependent children have a poverty risk of 24.8%, more than double that of families without children, which is only 10.5%. Instead of social policy easing the cost of raising children, it seems to leave that burden largely on the families themselves.
The rest of the audit shows that the problem is not limited to fertility. Albania is moving towards a completely different demographic structure: 15.4% of the population is over 65 according to the latest data, a figure that is projected to exceed 25% by 2050. This will increase pressure on the pension system, health and social Services, at a time when the contributory base, the working-age population, is shrinking day by day.
The report notes that labor force participation of those aged 55-64 and over 65 has increased significantly in recent years, which can be read as a sign of adaptation, but also as an indicator of the need to rely longer on the older workforce, in the absence of a younger generation to replace jobs, and an extreme need of this generation for financial resources, as long as pension benefits are among the lowest in the region and beyond for the majority of this population category.
Access to Services remains territorially unequal: 60% of the elderly live in rural areas, while only 38% of them benefit from social Services, according to figures cited by the SAI. The budget of the “Social Care” program has increased in nominal terms until 2024, but the planning for 2025 marked a decrease, a move that contradicts the intensification of needs that the report itself predicts for the coming years.
Another finding directly affects young people, the age group that leaves the country at the highest rates. The Youth Guarantee has been presented as the main instrument to keep young people in employment or education and to curb their emigration. But the SAI notes that the real results of the program are not published on the portal aimed at young people themselves.
The Ministry of Economy and Innovation keeps this data in other statistical reports and bulletins, away from the eyes of the group the program aims to inform. The audit assesses this as damaging the function of the portal itself as an information tool, at a time when the lack of trust of young people in public policies is precisely one of the reasons for emigration that the government seeks to address.
Equally concerning is the way the monitoring of existing strategies works. The SAI reviewed the annual monitoring reports of the Social Protection Strategy and found that some of the main interventions planned for 2024 have not been implemented at all, while many indicators are marked as “partially achieved”.
The audit links this to a lack of real accountability. The audit process itself, the KSHA underlines, has closely confronted this institutional culture: KSHA notes in the report that some institutions have delayed, without justification, the submission of documentation requested during the audit.
There is also an issue that goes beyond the scope of family policies, but which affects the reliability of the very data on which these policies are built: The 2023 census counts 2,402,113 inhabitants, while the INSTAT database for the same year gives 2,761,785, a difference of about 360 thousand people that the report points out without explaining.
For a country that is planning budgets, pensions, and health Services based on demographic projections, a gap of this size between two official sources creates additional uncertainty about the quality of the planning basis itself.
In response to the findings, the Ministry of Economy and Innovation has opposed some of the SAI's recommendations, while the audit institution has maintained that its findings remain in force.
What the report leaves in suspense is not whether Albania is aging, the data is clear in this regard, but whether the responsible institutions will move from sectoral documents to a single, funded and monitorable strategy.
Until then, according to the audit's own assessment, "as long as policies remain fragmented, not fully implemented and not guided by real data, the country risks not being able to cope sustainably" with a phenomenon that is already changing its economic and social structure./ acqj.al
