A lost decade: Albania has Europe’s lowest education spending

In 2015, Albania spent 3.1% of GDP on education. Ten years later, that figure has barely moved, reaching just 3.2%.

The minimal change shows that education has not received the financial boost needed to help transform the country’s economy and create promising opportunities and jobs for young people, at a time when the cost of living continues to rise.

Over the past decade, the education sector has shrunk and, judging by PISA results, its quality has declined, while European countries have been investing in technology, digital skills, innovation and vocational education to adapt to changes in the labor market.

Meanwhile, public investment in physical infrastructure assets averaged more than 5% of GDP throughout the past decade. Even so, the country still faces a shortfall in this area, owing to the lack of feasibility studies and the high levels of corruption found in many projects.

This budget policy has limited opportunities to develop human capital, while the economy has continued to rely on sectors that, to a considerable extent, create low-productivity, low-wage jobs.

The gap becomes more apparent when education funding is compared with that of European Union countries and the region.

According to Eurostat, EU governments’ spending on education reached around €860 billion in 2024, or 4.7% of the European Union’s GDP.

In the same year, Albania spent just 3.1% of GDP on education, 1.6 percentage points below the European average.

To reach the EU average, Albania would have needed to increase education funding by around 55% compared with its 2024 level.

The gap is even wider compared with Northern European countries, which have traditionally devoted a larger share of their budgets to developing human capital.

The gap is also substantial compared with Western Balkan countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina spends nearly 4% and Serbia 3.4%, according to Eurostat and World Bank data.

Moreover, the difference as a percentage of GDP does not fully reflect the actual gap in resources available to education.

Because European economies have much higher per capita incomes, education spending in absolute terms, per pupil or student, is generally much greater than in Albania./Monitor.al