We are bombarded daily with declarations that Albania is moving forward with giant strides, making all its malicious neighbors jealous.
We are told that resorts, marinas, airports, and exclusive residences are being built, and we are shown figures for millions of visitors and billion-dollar projects.
On the other hand, surprise is expressed as to why Albanians continue to massively abandon the country and do not feel they are beneficiaries of these investments.
Leaving aside the effect of propaganda, we often have difficulty understanding how “what is seen and what is not seen” influences public policy.
As early as 1850, Frédéric Bastiat pointed out the error of judging an economic policy only by its visible and immediate benefits, ignoring the invisible costs and long-term consequences it has on other groups.
The most important question for evaluating economic policies is: who gets the benefits and who pays the costs?
Many public policies create immediate and visible well-being for some, but bring harmful consequences for many others in the future, often with serious consequences for the country.
One of the areas where this is most apparent is in the difference between transferring existing wealth to a small group, enriching them, and creating new wealth that provides long-term benefits to many others.
The latter is the key to the enrichment of countries: when it invests in goals that increase productivity, improve or create new technologies, produces goods and services that create added value, especially when they are exported. So a country becomes enriched when it focuses on economic activities with high added value.
When the main source of profit in the economy is the appropriation of public land, natural resources, or privileges granted by the state, then we are not dealing with new value-added creation.
Wealth does not increase—it simply changes ownership from public property of all society to private profit for a few.
Essentially, this is the Albanian economic model: it concentrates rentier economic benefits on a small group and excludes the majority of Albanians from economic opportunities and benefits.
Sector after sector we see how public and natural assets are used to create private benefits, while the economic, social, environmental, and infrastructural bills remain with society.
Concessions and PPPs are perhaps the purest case. Albania is filled with contracts and privileges where private profit is guaranteed, while the risk is transferred to the state and taxpayers.
In this system, entrepreneurs are removed from any risk of loss, leaving them with a guaranteed profit, which is contrary to the fundamental logic of capitalism where reward and progress come precisely from taking risks under conditions of free competition.
The flamingo revolution showed that this pattern is particularly evident in sectors that rely on the country’s natural resources.
The protests confirmed that the conflict taking place in Albanian society is not between development and underdevelopment, but between the privatization of profits to a few people and the nationalization of costs to the government and society.
It is now clear who will benefit from the sale of apartments, villas, and luxury residences that will be built on a natural asset that belongs to everyone and from which entire communities benefited.
On the other hand, it is clear that all the costs of this private development will be passed on to the state, i.e. society: the cost of subsidies and fiscal incentives that will be given to the developer; payments for the public infrastructure that must be built (roads, water supply, sewage, energy); environmental costs from the irreplaceable loss of habitats, biodiversity and natural landscape; costs of waste management and pollution that will be produced privately; costs of additional public services (police, fire brigade, health, local administration); costs of replacing or restoring environmental damage; social costs on local communities (deprivation of traditional community activities such as the use of beaches, pastures or fishing).
We should not forget the opportunity costs, i.e. the loss of other economic opportunities that a protected area could generate through sustainable tourism, scientific research, or the preservation of natural heritage for future generations.
But perhaps the most revolting manifestation of this widespread pattern in every natural resource sector is in the oil field.
Albania’s main oil company, which produces hundreds of millions of euros of oil for export each year—in its best years it has reached as much as $600 million per year—has not paid a single penny in profit tax for over two decades.
By inflating expenses, invoicing and conducting transactions with companies hidden in tax havens, as the SPAK file on Bankers Petroleum shows, profits and tax liabilities have disappeared.
Meanwhile, the residents have nothing left of the black gold, except polluted land, water, and air.
The same brutal pattern is evident in the mining sector. Albania has significant deposits of chromium, copper, nickel, and other minerals that have been mined and exported for decades.
In 2024, exports of mining products were around 608 million dollars, while the mineral rent remaining for the Albanian economy, according to World Bank calculations, was only around 40–50 million USD per year.
Chromium, copper, and iron bring millions into the pockets of concessionaires while residents of mining areas remain in chronic poverty, while the country benefits nothing from the loss of these extraordinary assets.
On the contrary, the state is left with the slag, the pollution, the damaged infrastructure, and the collapsed galleries to rehabilitate with our money. The mineral becomes theirs, the pits and pollution remain with us.
This reality proves what I emphasized earlier: the debate is not whether we want development or not; the debate is what kind of development we want.
We want a development model where national assets become loot that enriches the pockets of a few and costs the majority, or a model where revenues generated from oil, minerals, the coast, and public assets are turned into welfare for all taxpayers.
No country becomes richer by selling its land, subsoil, and nature, but by turning them into public capital, stronger institutions, better services, and opportunities for future generations.
A century ago, Fan Noli wrote about the Albania of the excluded, of those who saw wealth pass them by without ever becoming part of it.
His line “by the table, uneaten” rings like a curse bell for being poor near tourist resorts, oil wells, and chrome mines.
Therefore, the choice before us is not an economic or ecological choice about the fate of flamingos. It is a deeply vital choice about the fundamental relationship between government and citizens.
Do national assets exist to serve the entire society or to enrich an economic-criminal minority that has taken control of power?
The answer to this question will determine whether we will remain impoverished spectators of our alienated assets, or whether we will become their legitimate owners.
Otherwise, future generations will remember this period as the time when Albania did not turn its endless wealth into prosperity and freedom for its citizens, who emigrated en masse to find the opportunities missing in Albania.
They will ask: when Albania was so rich, why did Albanians remain at the table uneaten?