About 940 thousand educated Albanians want to leave the country

Screenshot of the 'With a Few Words' show in Euronews Albania 

 In the early ‘90s, Albanians wanted to live in Europe, now in the early 2020s, they want to live like Europeans. The exodus of Albanians during the first years of transition focused on people with low education and unemployment, but the drivers of emigration in recent years have changed.

These reasons were discussed on Tuesday, in the show 'With a Few Words' on Euronews Albania. Health, education, social services, and in general the improvement of life quality have become the main requirements that motivate emigration as well.

According to a study by the Center for Economic and Social Studies in 2018, 52% of the Albanian population aged 18-40, about 940 thousand inhabitants, want to leave, while only a decade ago this figure was 44%. Only 7% of them have a real chance to leave.

Doing the calculations, it turns out that about 34 thousand Albanians aged 18-40 can emigrate every year and more than half of them have vocational, university, and postgraduate education.

The desire to migrate is slightly higher in groups with above-average incomes than in those with lower incomes.

So the emigration of the fourth decade has in its center the most active population in Albania and the most productive for the market and the economy. This fact has brought another consequence, the shrinking and aging of the population as well as the reduction of fertility.

Albania has lost its human capital, ie the labor force with high productivity, as a result of the emigration of the youth and the qualified layer of the population.

A typical example of this phenomenon are the Albanian entrepreneurs in Italy. About 460 thousand Albanians at the working-age are immigrants in Italy and about 47 thousand of them are entrepreneurs, ie almost 10%.

This population-entrepreneur ratio is twice as small in Albania where about 5% of the working-age population are entrepreneurs.