On March 13th, 2018, CESPIC organized a seminar entitled “Static and dynamic analysis of poverty in Albania”. This seminar aimed to comprehend and investigate the part played by economic growth and income inequality in poverty level evolution in time and space.
In recent years Albania has registered a sustained and continuous economic expansion, characterized by high growth rates that most of the other Western Countries have not yet matched. Despite these successful economic performances, Albania still distinguishes itself for one of the lowest GDP per capita of Europe and the Balkans, strong emigration trends, high unemployment rates, and a workforce excessively centered in the primary sector. These facts generally depict the ongoing presence of marginalization and pockets of deprivation. Poverty is an element easy to detect and its evidence lies in the mismatch of a person/family wealth with the minimum standard set in a determined social context. Nonetheless, though it may appear easy to detect poverty and to appraise families’ wealth, to quantify poverty threshold, deprivation intensity and poverty spread – as the different terms and expressions uttered by sociologists, economists and political scientists suggest – is way harder.
If it is true that we have different poverty definitions and conceptualizations, the plethora of measuring models and technics is the confirmation of poverty and wealth concepts fragmentation.
During this seminar, outputs connected to two specific analyses, – the first, ex-ante, was grounded on Kakawni’s static decomposition; the second, ex-post, was based on Datt & Ravallion (1992) and Shorrocks’ (1999) dynamic decomposition – which allowed us to observe links between poverty, inequality, and economic growth.
