Among the industrial countries, Japan made stronger efforts to bring its long recession to an end – through macro-economic stimulus and by strengthening its domestic banking system – and there are now signs that those efforts are beginning to be rewarded. Meanwhile the world economy has been effectively underpinned by continuing abnormally strong domestic demand growth in the United States. But despite these developments we still have a long way to go. If the immediate danger of global financial instability has receded, we are still stuck with slow growth in the world economy, currently at around 2½%, which is not much more than half the estimated trend growth rate. And we are stuck, too, with massive international imbalances, both between the emerging and industrial countries, on the one hand, and among the major industrial countries, on the other. Without a stronger resumption of capital inflows to the emerging markets, the industrial countries will need to accommodate an export-led recovery in those markets. That implies stronger domestic demand, and hence import, growth in the G7 countries, if the world economy as a whole is to get back on trend in the reasonably near term. And the immediate challenge in this situation is to try to ensure that, as domestic demand growth in the United States slows – as it probably must, by one means or another – demand picks up sufficiently elsewhere, especially in Europe and Japan, to take up the running.
During 2011, seminars and round-tables were organised, aiming at training and sharing scientific novelties among economists at local and international level, thus making the Bank of Albania a point of reference for researchers of economics and finance. The main focus of Bank of Albania’s research papers was on issues pertaining to: financial stability, monetary policy, fiscal policy, regional integration and trade relations, study of uncertainties arising from estimation of econometric models, etc. At the same time, with the assistance of foreign experts, we worked for constructing and improving macroeconomic and statistical models, on the basis of which the Bank of Albania builds its projections for macroeconomic and financial indicators.   Improving communication with the public  Establishment of transparent and productive relations with the public is an integral part of Bank of Albania’s development strategy. The conduct of activities for financial education of the public was a priority of the communication strategy in 2011. In order to achieve Bank of Albania’s objectives in this area, we carried out a number of educational activities in 2011. Among them, we would highlight the project for integrating the financial education into high-school curricula in Albania. A working group with Bank of Albania’s experts, assisted by experts of curricula from the Institute for Educational Development, worked for compiling the curricula and preparing the text in the form of a free-choice module, which was incorporated into the high-school curricula for the first time in the 2011/2012 academic year.