Irena Beqiraj
In 1956, Belgium completed its first motorway, which ran from the capital, Brussels, to Ostend, where the royal family had their summer home. The motorway was built specifically for international holidaymakers and tourists. The new road undoubtedly brought a boom in tourists, as it was never wide enough in peak season and was almost empty in the off-season.
Likewise, the shops and restaurants, the high-rise apartments built along the coast, whose construction destroyed the dunes and drove away wildlife, were transformed from overcrowded to empty. The huge investments in tourism did not save the city from economic difficulties, which in the 1980s, turned to special European funds to recover its economy.
The story of Ostend has been experienced in many tourist destinations, but there is no doubt that it will be experienced in Albania as well. Nothing outside of economic logic has happened. It is the approaches and narratives of the government that are outside of reality and against economic logic.
Tourism requires intensive public and private infrastructure, which unfortunately is used at full capacity only during the season and it is difficult to find alternative uses for these infrastructures during other periods of the year.
Underutilization of investments greatly reduces the return on investment by increasing the pressure on prices in the season. This pressure of increasing prices in the season increases even more especially when tourist facilities are small, fragmented, and cannot benefit from economies of scale.
Also, seasonality in employment has made wages about 2.5 times higher than the productivity of tourism-related services, greatly increasing the costs of providing the service.
While tourism in Albania is expanding, at the same time the agricultural sector, which should support this expansion by also experiencing growth, is in depression with 13 quarters of decline. The country imports most of its essential goods and products. If the country continues to increase imports and experience a decrease in domestic production for most of the essential goods and products consumed in the territory, further expansion of tourism will undoubtedly be accompanied by inflation and further price increases.
The government's over-optimism for tourism as the basic sector that will support economic growth has easily and short-sightedly allocated the most limited financial and human resources there, weakening the strength and ability of other sectors that are a real opportunity for sustainable development. The construction of hotels, or villa complexes makes the surrounding areas less suitable for other purposes, such as agriculture and farming, industry, or recreational areas for locals.
Relying on tourism and the construction of Five Star hotels is the sure path to the Hawaiian economy, or the economy of services with low productivity (cleaners and waiters), which will have to buy Artificial Intelligence, technology, but also basic consumer goods from more advanced economies. As a result of low productivity which leads to a relatively low standard of living, compared to the surrounding world, desertification (the flight of people from the cities, and then the entire country) is the inevitable result.
For example, Ostend, by choosing tourism, lost the opportunity to be a strategic trading point between France, England and Belgium.
What has Albania lost? No one is able to answer this question.
But as always, by refusing to understand how the economy works, we have found, in the blink of an eye, the enemies of the government's laudable efforts to create the "Maldives of Europe." They are the Vlora people and their greed!
Editorial
