Despite their historic and ethnic ties, trade and investment between Albania and Kosovo remains underdeveloped. To be sure, even if fully developed, Kosovo is unlikely to play a major role in Albanian external economic relations. Nonetheless, increased economic integration between the two countries can serve as the basis not only for enhancing the ties between the two countries, but also for spurring the measures that could act as a springboard for Albania’s integration with respect to other countries in the Balkans as well as with the EU.
In this report, we examine the state of play in the trade in goods, trade in services, movement of workers and movement of capital in order to identify potential issues and offer recommendations that could help unbind institutional constraints and as such facilitate the process of deeper integration between Albania and Kosovo.
The scope of this type of endeavor is rather large, and with this introductory report, we would like to raise key questions and themes that we hope would generate feedback from the government, private actors and other public sector representatives in order to turn an idea into an action plan.