Or as we usually say, the interest rate path is a forecast, not a promise. The uncertainty was also illustrated with some alternative scenarios, where we among other things examined how the forecast for the repo rate would be affected by a more rapid increase in wages. For the first time, we wrote in detail about these problems of monetary policy considerations in our report and to mark this the Inflation Report changed its name to the Monetary Policy Report. During the spring new information was received, which to some extent made us revise our assessments. The labour market situation looked to be tighter than expected, partly because the supply of labour was not increasing as much as we had expected. The new wage agreements signed in the labour market were slightly higher than both we and many other analysts had anticipated. At our monetary policy meeting in May, we Executive Board members were unanimous that the repo rate needed to be raised in total more than we had previously thought. But we did not yet have a complete picture of the central wage negotiations and I personally did not consider the change to be so large that there was reason to move more quickly and raise the interest rate already in May. An own repo rate forecasts allows us to discuss in a natural way the timing of future interest rate changes. But in May we did not publish any new interest rate forecast and our communication was limited to a qualitative assessment.
The rapid transformation of economic structure and the development of interbank markets and economic agents were coupled with fundamental changes in the monetary policy transmission mechanism. The latter has now become more complex, involving more players whose sophistication is ever-increasing, and incorporating more instruments and financial contracts that are timely structured and indexed to different indicators. The Albanian economy is now economically and financially integrated into the global economy, having the characteristics of a market economy but at the same time featuring the typical challenges of economic management that such an economy entails. These changes have called for the constant monitoring by the monetary authority in order to make the necessary changes in the monetary policy regime and the operational aspects of its implementation. Against this background, the Bank of Albania has been committed to a process of constant evaluation of the interbank market performance and at the same time fine-tune its monetary policy regime. The Monetary Policy Document for the 2009–2011 Period was a major step in this regard. In this Document, the role of monetary aggregates as indicators of inflationary pressures in economy and as intermediate targets of monetary policy was complemented with a wide range of information provided by the real sector of the economy, which is systemized and finalized in the inflation forecast performance. This change was entirely based on the Albanian experience.