Numbers Against the Narrative: What Albania’s Procurement Record Actually Tells Europe

The data behind Albania’s procurement system tells a different story than its reputation, forcing a more precise question for EU decision-makers.

By Bekim Besimi (Venice)

There is a point in every enlargement process where argument detaches from evidence and begins to run on reputation alone. Albania has reached that point. The country is now judged as much by the memory of what its institutions were as by the measurable record of what they have become. That tension is no longer rhetorical. It is empirical, and it sits directly inside the data European governments are supposed to use when making accession decisions.

The latest 2025 indicator report from the Albanian Public Procurement Agency arrives into that gap. It is, formally, a self-produced document. That matters. Any institution summarizing its own performance selects what to foreground and what to leave implicit. But dismissing the report on that basis alone misses where its actual weight lies. The core findings are not internal claims. They are external measurements.

Three independent assessment frameworks evaluated Albania’s procurement system in 2025. They do not use identical methodologies, nor do they measure the same dimensions. Yet they converge on the same direction of travel.

SIGMA/OECD looks at institutional architecture: the quality of legislation, the functioning of central institutions, the efficiency of operations, the degree of professionalization, and the strength of the review system. On that structure, Albania ranks first in the Western Balkans with an average score of 81 out of 100. The World Bank’s PEFA framework evaluates performance in practice, how systems operate across monitoring, methods, transparency, and complaints management. There, Albania moves from B+ to A, with maximum scores across all four dimensions. OpenTender, by contrast, is not an institutional audit but a data-driven integrity tool, designed to detect patterns associated with favoritism and restricted competition. On that metric, Albania scores above the majority of EU member states.

These are not three versions of the same dataset repeating each other. They are three different lenses applied to the same system. One looks at rules, one at performance, one at outcomes. When all three move in the same direction, the burden shifts. The question is no longer whether the system has changed. It is whether the narrative used to describe it has kept up.

The internal data reinforces this picture, and the most consequential shift is one that has received almost no attention in political debate. The share of negotiated procedures without prior publication has fallen from roughly 30 percent in 2010 to 2.4 percent in 2025. That number is not technical. It is structural. For most of the post-communist period, non-competitive negotiated procedures were the primary channel through which procurement corruption operated. Directed award is easiest where competition is absent. Albania did not lack laws restricting such procedures. What it lacked was compliance at scale. The drop in their use reflects a change not in legislation, but in behavior across thousands of procurement decisions over time.

What makes that shift credible is what happened alongside it. Contracting authorities did not simply lose access to one tool. They adopted another. Framework agreements, which allow for repeated procurement through pre-competitive selection, expanded from a marginal instrument a decade ago to a central one today. That is what institutional reform looks like when it is real. Not prohibition alone, but substitution. The system closes one channel and opens a legitimate alternative.

Competition indicators point in the same direction. The average number of bids per procedure has increased steadily, reaching 3.7 in 2025, with public works procedures averaging close to six bidders. This matters because infrastructure is the highest-risk category for collusion across the region. Sustaining coordinated bidding across five or six independent operators is significantly more difficult than in a field of two or three. These numbers do not eliminate corruption. They do describe an environment in which its systematic organization becomes harder to maintain.

This is the part of the argument that tends to be ignored by those who prefer to work from reputation. It is easier to assert that nothing has changed than to engage with indicators that suggest otherwise. But the indicators are not abstract. They describe constraints. Fewer negotiated procedures, more bidders, and wider use of competitive instruments narrow the space in which certain types of corruption can operate.

That does not mean the system is clean. It means the form of risk is changing.

The most important weakness in the entire dataset is also the least discussed. On transparency, Albania performs significantly worse than it does on integrity. The availability and completeness of procurement information lag behind the procedural improvements. This gap is not cosmetic. It is structural. Integrity indicators measure the likelihood that rules are being followed. Transparency determines whether violations, when they occur, can be detected.

A system can reduce overt procedural manipulation and still obscure outcomes through limited disclosure, incomplete data, or inaccessible documentation. In more mature procurement environments, corruption does not disappear. It migrates. It moves from the selection of procedure to the writing of specifications, the calibration of evaluation criteria, and the structuring of subcontracting chains. None of these are fully visible in the indicators presented here. They require a different kind of scrutiny, one that combines data with case-level investigation.

This is where the absence of prosecutorial linkage becomes critical. A procurement system that shows improved procedural integrity should, over time, produce a different pattern of enforcement. Either fewer systemic abuses appear, or the ones that do are detected and prosecuted more effectively. Without that layer, the picture remains incomplete. Reform in architecture is measurable. Reform in accountability requires evidence of action.

That is the line critics should be pressing. Not that nothing has changed, but whether the changes that are measurable are matched by changes in enforcement where measurement is harder.

The opposing argument, as it is usually presented, does not engage at that level. It rests on continuity. Albania had a corruption problem in procurement. Therefore it still has one of the same nature and scale. That argument is politically convenient. It is also analytically weak. It treats time as irrelevant and reform as cosmetic by default. It allows no mechanism through which improvement could be recognized even if it occurred.

The evidence now available does not support that position. It shows a system that has undergone measurable, sustained, externally validated change in one of the governance domains most historically vulnerable to abuse. It also shows a system that has not yet closed the loop between procedural integrity and full transparency, and that has not demonstrated, through publicly visible enforcement data, that new forms of risk are being systematically addressed.

That is a more demanding conclusion than either of the simplified narratives currently in circulation. It rejects the claim that nothing has changed. It also rejects the claim that the problem is solved.

For European governments assessing Albania’s readiness, that distinction matters. Enlargement decisions are not made on reputation. They are made, at least in principle, on evidence. The evidence in this case points to a system that is no longer what it was fifteen years ago, and not yet what it needs to be.

The question is not whether Albania has a perfect procurement system. No country in the European Union does. The question is whether the direction of change is real, sustained, and aligned with the standards the Union itself applies.

On that question, the data gives an answer that is more inconvenient than either side of the debate has been willing to admit.

READ THE REPORT HERE

Bekim Besimi writes from Venice, Italy, where he contributes to The Tirana Examiber with a focus on economic governance, public finance, and fiscal transparency in the Western Balkans. His reporting examines how political narratives intersect with budgetary realities and institutional data.