Migrants will be more willing to send and invest remittances if inflation is kept under control and exchange rate and financial conditions are reasonably stable. Furthermore, the Bank of Albania in cooperation with other governmental and nongovernmental institutions has been considering some more concrete measures in order to enhance the role of remittances in economy. I would like to mention a few of them: First: improvement of statistics on remittances. Reliable data regarding remittances is a key ingredient in designing and assessing policies about enhancing their developing role. The Bank of Albania has continuously stressed the importance of accurate estimation of capital inflows in the form of migrants’ remittances. Assisted by IMF missions, it has been working to bring the methodology closer to the international standards in defining remittances. Also, there is a close cooperation with our main partner countries Greece and Italy, as the main destinations of the Albanian emigrants, to harmonise our methodologies in order to improve the accuracy of remittances’ estimation. Second: Bringing workers’ remittances into formal channels. The high portion of remittances that goes through unofficial channels asks for actions to make official channels  4/5  more appealing in terms of efficiency, safety, cost and anonymity. Although, I mentioned earlier that emigrants seems to have more access to banking that their families back home, their relation with the banks is still difficult due to language problems (most often the forms are in the native language of the resident country) and in many cases excessive document requirements to open a bank account.
On making this announcement, it is crucial that I explain again the role which staff macroeconomic projections play in the ECB’s monetary policy strategy. The ECB’s primary objective is the maintenance of price stability in the euro area. Given the lags in the transmission of monetary policy to the price level, monetary policy must be forward-looking. Therefore, all analysis undertaken at the ECB is focused on the risks to future price stability. The analysis underlying monetary policy decisions is organised within two frameworks, which we refer to as the two pillars. The Governing Council’s forward-looking assessment of the economic situation and the outlook for price stability is based on both a prominent role for money, denoted as the first pillar, and a broadly based assessment of other economic and financial indicators, labelled the second pillar. The projections that will be published by the ECB as from December are, as with any conventional macroeconomic forecast or projection, derived from analytical frameworks in which money plays only a limited role, if any. Hence such projections, which mostly reflect developments in variables other than money, naturally form part of the second pillar of the ECB’s strategy. The projections help to underpin the forward-looking orientation of monetary policy. They summarise and synthesise a large quantity of information that might otherwise be too unwieldy to form a sensible basis for policy discussions.