WIIW The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies - Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche

End-of-year balance of payments data for 2011 suggest that remittances from Albanian migrants (mostly located in crisis-shattered Greece and Italy) did not drop as much as expected; on the contrary, they increased slightly. The inflow of remittances thus accounted for about 8% of GDP, almost as much as the inflow of FDI. Given the positive developments in potentially weak areas of the Albanian economy, we have revised upwards our previous GDP growth rate estimate for 2011 by one percentage point to 2.9% and our GDP growth rate forecast for 2012 by 10 basis points to 2.3%.