Ardian Fullani: Needed – a new way of thinking, a new approach to economic policy Speech by Mr Ardian Fullani, Governor of the Bank of Albania, at the 6th South-Eastern European Economic Research Workshop, organized by the Bank of Albania, Tirana, 19 November 2012. *  *  *  Dear workshop participants, Dear central banks colleagues, I am very happy to be here today, in this 6th South-Eastern European Economic Research Workshop. This Workshop is an annual event that Bank of Albania organizes, aiming to successfully bring together researchers and their work from the region and beyond. We are very glad for your personal contribution and your institutions’ commitment to this activity. The participation map extends every year and we take this development as a sign of recognition. This activity takes place as Albania celebrates its 100 anniversary of independence, which happened on 28 November 1912; we are, therefore, very happy to welcome you on the occasion of this very important event. The South-Eastern European Economic Research Workshop provides a platform to discuss and, most importantly, improve our work. It also provides a platform that contributes to the extension of regional cooperation in the area of research, making an additional contribution to the cooperation in other important areas of Central Banking in the region. As I have previously mentioned, countries of the SEE region are similar in many aspects including the state of economic problems and economic research. We are focusing on finding the problems in the existing models.
It takes many forms, and should extend across all areas of central banking. Few of the materials that will be discussed today and tomorrow illustrate this initiative very well. I hope there will be more similar examples in future workshops. The presentations and discussions today and tomorrow address a wide range of issues, reflecting the nature of problems that our economies are facing. I understand from the programme that our guests’ focus of research is similar to the one at the Bank of Albania. During the past year, we have focused on financial stability and monetary policy, trade integration and trade relations, and the modelling of stochastic economic process. But above all, the crisis, its implications, the channels of transmission, and policy response have become the focus of empiric and theoretic research in the central banks and academia during the last 4 years. The results of this research and analysis have taken central banks and their monetary and regulatory policies beyond what was considered sacred limits of monetary policy. However, this has not proven very helpful for the economy. It is now five years since the crisis began and the more authorities deal with short-term problems of growth and unemployment, the more they reveal long-term imbalances and structural problems of national and global scale. In the meantime, we still cannot fully define, understand and model the economy in its true stochastic form.