FINANCING
THE NEW OWN
FUNCTIONS OF
LOCAL
GOVERNMENTS
IN ALBANIA
USAID
PLANNING
AND
LOCAL
GOVERNANCE
PROJECT
PLANNING AND LOCAL
GOVERNANCE PROJECT
DRAFT-POLICY BRIEF: FINANCING THE NEW
OWN FUNCTIONS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS
IN ALBANIA
June 2018
This publication was produced for review by the United States Agency for International
Development. It was prepared by Tetra Tech ARD.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Prepared for the United States Agency for International Development, USAID Contract Number
AID-182-C-12-00001, Albania Planning and Local Governance Project (PLGP)
This draft-policy brief was prepared by: Tony Levitas and Elton Stafa
Tetra Tech ARD Home Office Address:
Tetra Tech ARD
159 Bank Street, Suite 300
Burlington, Vermont 05401 USA
Telephone: (802) 658-3890
Fax: (802) 658-4247
www.ardinc.com
Tetra Tech ARD Contact:
Adrienne Raphael, Senior Technical Advisor/Manager
adrienne.raphael@tetratech.com
PLGP Contact:
Kevin McLaughlin, PLGP Chief of Party
kevin.mclaughlin@tetratech.com
We would like to thank Fran Brahimi of the Ministry of Finance and Economy and Florian Nurçe
of the Ministry of Educa�on and Sport for cri�cal support in the prepara�on of this policy brief.
DISCLAIMER
The author’s views expressed in this publica�on do not necessarily reflect the views of the United
States Agency for Interna�onal Development or the United States Government.
Contents
Execu�ve Summary ....................................................................................................................................... 3
1. Purpose of this Brief .................................................................................................................................. 5
2. The Origins of the Current Situa�on.......................................................................................................... 6
3. The Fundamental Problems....................................................................................................................... 7
Social Welfare Centers .......................................................................................................................... 8
Recommenda�ons for Social Welfare Centers ..................................................................................... 9
Dormitories ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Recommenda�ons for Dormitories .................................................................................................... 11
Fire Protec�on, Agriculture and Irriga�on, Forestry .......................................................................... 11
Recommenda�ons for Fire Protec�on, Agriculture and Irriga�on, Forestry ...................................... 13
4. Local Governments, Preschool Educa�on, and Per Pupil Funding .......................................................... 13
Overview Preschool Educa�on in Albania .......................................................................................... 14
5. The Specific Challenges of Developing a Per-Pupil Formula for Preschool Educa�on in Albania Today 18
Recommenda�ons for Preschools Educa�on ..................................................................................... 24
Executive Summary
The 2015 Law on Local Self-Government (LSGL) substantially increased the role of democraticallyelected local governments in Albania by assigning to them a number of new own-functions. The
most important of them is the responsibility for financing and managing preschools. Others
include fire protection, irrigation and drainage, providing counselling services to farmers, and
managing and maintaining forests, pastures, and rural roads.
As “own functions” municipalities should have sufficient legal authority to over these services to
deliver them in ways that are aligned with the preferences and priorities of their electorates.
They must also be able to finance them from their general revenues and not from conditional
grants from the national government.
When the LSGL was passed, however, it contained a provision that allowed these new own
functions to be financed by conditional grants –Specific Transfers—for three years. This
transitional period was put in place to give the national government time to both harmonize
sectoral legislation and to introduce changes in the intergovernmental finance system that would
allow municipalities to pay for these new responsibilities from their general revenues.
This transition period expires at the end of this year, and in 2019, it is expected that municipalities
will not only exercise greater managerial control over these functions, but that they will start
financing from their general revenues –meaning out of some combination of the unconditional
transfers that they receive from the national government and the revenues they derive from local
fees, charges and taxes.
Figuring out how local governments should get these general revenues is however a big challenge
for at least three reasons. First, the national government is currently spending more than 8.5
billion lek to finance these functions through Specific Transfers. This is equal to more than 20%
of total local government revenues, and more than 50% of today’s Unconditional Transfer. As a
result, municipalities will need to see a very substantial increase in their freely disposable
revenues if they are to finance the existing costs of these functions –functions which to greater
or less degree have been underfunded for years.
Second, while there is undoubtedly room for Albanian municipalities to improve the collection of
their own tax revenues, there is little chance that such improvements could significantly offset
the costs of these new functions in the foreseeable future. As a result, and in the immediate, the
only viable way to provide local governments with the necessary funds to finance these functions
will be to substantially increase the size of the Unconditional Grant.
Third, and most importantly, it will be almost certainly necessary to increase the size of the
Unconditional Grant by more than the 8.5 billion ALL that the national government is currently
spending on these functions through Specific Transfers. The most fundamental reason for this is
that the ways these functions are currently being provided and financed by the national
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government does not reflect any objective measure of the need for these services across the
country as a whole. The clearest illustration of this is with fire protection because in many areas
of the country the national government simply did not build or staff fire stations. But similar
problems exist with all of the concerned functions. For example, while all local governments
currently have preschools some have many more than others in relationship to the number of
preschool children they have to educate.
What this means is that if the same amount of money that is currently being spent on these
functions (through Specific Transfers) is allocated to local governments on the basis of more
objective measures of need --such as a municipality’s population, or the number of preschool
children it serves-- then municipalities who currently have relatively more of these institutions
than others, will receive less funding through the Unconditional Transfer than they did through
conditional grants Indeed, in some cases so much less funding that they may not be able to
provide the service at all, or will have to radically reorganize how they deliver it.
As a result, moving from a system in which the national government provides conditional grants
to individual local governments on the basis of the existing costs of the institutions located on
their territories, to one in which the national government allocates Unconditional Transfers to all
local governments based on objective measures of their relative needs almost always requires
increasing the size of the Unconditional Transfer by more than current level of conditional grants.
In following, we discuss the dilemmas of moving from conditional grants to unconditional
transfers for each of the new functions that have been assigned to local governments by the
LGFL. But we pay particular attention, to preschool education because it is by far the costliest
responsibility that the Government of Albania (GoA) has assigned to municipalities, and arguably
the most important for the country’s future.
Here, we argue that while it would probably have been best to consider preschool education as
a shared-function, it is possible to integrate a fair and equitable (weighted) per pupil formula into
the Unconditional Transfer. But doing so will also requiring a) adding new funds into the system
b) phasing in the introduction of the formula and c) providing municipalities with legal authority
and technical support to reorganize their preschool networks –not least because demographic
decline and internal migration will force at least some municipalities to close facilities and
redeploy teachers in their preschool systems.
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1. Purpose of this Brief
In 2015, the Government of Albania (GoA) consolidated 373 municipalities and communes into
61 larger municipalities. The creation of these larger municipalities was the first step in a broader
plan to increase the role of democratically-elected local governments in the country’s system of
public administration1.
Once local governments had been consolidated, the GoA passed a new framework law on Local
Self-Government (LSGL)2. This law transferred important service responsibilities to municipalities
as own-functions. In accordance with the basic definition of own functions, municipalities should
have sufficient legal authority to deliver the services associated with own-functions in ways that
are aligned with their preferences and priorities. Indeed, they should be free not to provide a
service related to an own-function if they see fit, and so long as they are not violating other laws.
Finally, own functions should be financed from general revenues and not from conditional grants
whose terms and conditions are set by the national government.
But despite defining municipalities’ new responsibilities as own-functions, the LSGL put in place
a three-year transition period during which municipalities would receive conditional grants –
Specific Transfers-- to finance them. This transition period ends this year, and the expectation is
that beginning in 2019 municipalities will not only be given greater managerial control over these
newly decentralized functions, but that they will start paying for them through some combination
of local taxes and fees, and the Unconditional Grant that they receive from the national
government.
The purpose of this Brief is to explain the most important challenges that need to be addressed
in order to move to the unconditional funding of these new services, and to recommend way that
this might best be done. First, we trace the origins of the current situation and briefly
characterize the most important problems that need to be addressed. We illustrate these
problems by discussing the non-educational functions that have recently been decentralized and
outline some recommendations about how their financing might be treated going forward.
Finally, we focus most of our attention on preschool education because as we shall see it is by far
the costliest responsibility that the GoA has assigned to municipalities, and arguably the most
important for Albania’s future.
1
Government of Albania, National Crosscutting Strategy for Decentralization and Local Governance 2014-2020
December 2014, Tirana, pp 1-34
2
Law no. 139/2015, On Local Self-Government (LSGL)
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2. The Origins of the Current Situation
Before the passage of the LSGL, territorial agencies of the GoA financed and managed fire
protection, agricultural services, irrigation, forestry and road maintenance. Line ministries set the
budgets of these agencies, directly hired and fired their directors, and were --at least in theory—
responsible for ensuring that services of a reasonably similar standard were provided across the
country as a whole. In most cases, this was not achieved and the poor quality and uneven
provision of many of the services that are now being decentralized is –as we shall see-- important
for understanding the current situation. But for the moment, the main point is that prior to 2016,
these were all pure national government functions.
The situation in education, and in a few select social services, however, was different. The
previous framework law on local self-government had defined education as a shared function,
and local governments had been given ownership of all schools located in their jurisdictions. As
owners, they were assigned responsibility for maintaining and improving school facilities and for
paying the costs of all school utilities out of their general revenues.
In the early 2000s, the GoA delegated the responsibility for paying the wages of all nonpedagogical staff to local governments. This was done by (non-transparently) tacking on to each
local governments Unconditional Transfer, a conditional grant for the wages of school support
staff. The value of these conditional grants was determined by adding up the number of support
staff actually employed in a local government’s school system and then multiplying it by the
average national wage of such workers. As a result, these conditional grants did not reflect the
need for support staff as determined by some standard or formula. Instead, they were based on
the number of workers the Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth (MoESY) had recently allowed
schools to employ.
In 2008, the GoA delegated responsibility for managing and financing 27 school dormitories, as
well six social welfare centers to local governments. Again, this was done by tacking onto the
Unconditional Transfer the total amount of money that the national government had recently
spent on these institutions. Both in the case of school dormitories and in the case of social welfare
centers –which included some orphanages and old age homes—these institutions largely served
people who did not come from the local governments in which the institutions were located. As
a result, there was little political incentive for the local governments to improve their operations.
With the passage of the LSGL, fire protection, maintaining and improving irrigation and drainage
systems, providing counsel services to farmers, and maintaining local roads were all made local
government own-functions. Municipalities were also made fully responsible for preschool
education, meaning now they had to finance not just the wages of support staff but those of
teachers as well.
LSGL, however, contained provisions that allowed the GoA to finance these new responsibilities
through conditional grants –now called Specific Transfers-- because it was not clear how these
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functions could be financed through the Unconditional Transfer, a grant which was also being
restructured at the time. As before, these conditional grants received were calculated by
summing-up what the national government said it had previously spent on these institutions.
Table I below, shows that in 2018 the total amount of Specific Transfers that municipalities will
receive is greater than 8.5 bln lek, a sum equal to almost 20% of total municipal revenue and
more than half the value of the Unconditional Transfer. Cleary how these monies are allocated
to local governments in the future is of critical importance to the financial well-being of Albania’s
municipalities. Moreover, their most costly new function is their responsibility for paying the
salaries of preschool teachers. These salaries, combined with those of non-pedagogical
employees in all schools account for well over 60% all specific transfers. As such, the most
significant problem facing policy makers is how monies intended for education should be
allocated to local governments once the provisions for Specific Transfers expire.
Table 1 Specific Transfers Broken Down by Category in 2018
Wages:
Preschool
Teachers
mln ALL
% of Total
# employed
# of LGs with instit.
3,609
42%
4,410
61
Wages:
Support Staff
Pre & Prim.
Schools
1,015
12%
2,186
61
Wages:
Support
Fire
Staff Sec.
Prot.
Schools
469 1,185
6%
14%
797 1,167
57 (47) 61
Irrigation,
Drainage, &
Agric.
Support
847
10%
328
61
Forestry
Rural
roads
Dorms
Soc.
Centers
Total
276
3%
261
58
516
6%
?
58
514
6%
?
27
88
1%
?
6
8,519
100%
na
na
Source: MoFE and MoESY
3. The Fundamental Problems
Once the provisions for Specific Transfers expire at the end of the year, local governments will be
expected to finance their new own functions from their general revenues, meaning through some
combination of their own tax revenues and the monies they receive through the Unconditional
Grant. In theory, a significant portion of the costs of these new functions could be covered by
giving local government some combination of new tax powers, new shares of national taxes as
well as by expecting municipalities to do a better job collecting the taxes they already control.
In practice, however, not much can be expected from any of these options in the immediate
future: There is no high yielding tax that national government can reasonably give to local
governments. The base of the Personal Income Tax is too unevenly distributed across the country
as a whole to expect that it could finance functions as costly as teachers wages in most
municipalities. And while, local governments can and should improve the collection of their own
revenues, there is no chance that this can be done overnight or on anything like the scale that
would be required to significantly offset the costs of the new functions.
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As a result, the only realistic way of providing local governments with the funds they will need to
finance their new own functions is through the expansion of the Unconditional Transfer. And
here there are three critical issues:
•
•
•
How much should the Unconditional Transfer be expanded in order to ensure that the
total amount of funding local governments receive is adequate with respect to the costs
of their new responsibilities?
On what objective measures of relative need should the Unconditional Transfer by
allocated to local governments to ensure the overall equity of the system.
And how can the system be made stable and predictable over time as these needs
change.
In the following we examine these issues with respect to each of the new functions that have
been assigned local governments. Here, we argue that answering these questions is complicated
by a problem that has thus far been little discussed by Albanian policy makers. In short, the
functions that that are now being decentralized to local governments have never been provided
or financed by the national government in accordance with any objective measure of the need,
or any clear set of service standards. As a result, the array of institutions that currently provide
these services, as well as the number of people they employ and the quality of their buildings
and equipment, differs significantly from place to place as do the quality of the services they
provide.
Before focusing on education, as the costliest of the new functions, it is worth briefly examining
these issues in a few of the other, less weighty, sectors in which municipalities have been
assigned own-functions. Here, what we are trying to illustrate is the tension between delegating
to municipalities managerial control over particular institutions and decentralizing to them
broader sectoral responsibilities as own-functions.
Social Welfare Centers
As can be seen from Table 1, six municipalities receive Specific Transfers worth a total of 88
million ALL to support Social Welfare Centers for children with disabilities and old age homes.
This constitutes 1% of all Specific Transfers and is thus a small part of the problem, but one that
nonetheless expresses in miniature issues that reappear elsewhere.
The central tension lies in the fact that only six municipalities currently have social welfare
centers while the LSGL requires all local governments to provide services to disabled children and
the elderly. If we assume, with the LSGL that all local governments should provide these services,
then it is unfair to give special treatment to those municipalities that happen to have them now.
Instead, the money currently being spent on these centers should be shared by all municipalities.
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This would argue for putting the 88 million ALL into the Unconditional Grant and allocating it by
population or by the number of disabled or elderly people living in each municipality.
Doing this, however, will give municipalities that don’t have Social Welfare Centers a little more
money than they received before, but not enough to actually provide any significant social
welfare services, to say nothing about building (and staffing) a new social welfare center.
Meanwhile, the six municipalities that currently have centers will get significantly less money
than before, and certainly not enough to keep their centers open without adding in additional
funds.
Faced with this dilemma, municipalities may well choose to close the centers they and spend the
monies they receive through the Unconditional Grant on other functions. Moreover, the
incentive to close the centers will be particularly strong if the centers in fact serve large numbers
of children and elderly who actually come from other municipalities. Worse, the national
government will have weak legal grounds for preventing these closures, precisely because as an
own-function financed through freely disposable monies, municipalities should be free not to
provide a service if they think it doesn’t serve the best interests of their electorates.
In this case, in other words, there two central problems: The first is the tension between the
unequal distribution of the current institutions and finances associated with the function. And
the second is whether in fact the current institution really shouldn’t be considered local
government institutions at all because they were designed to serve citizens from all of the
country.
Recommendations for Social Welfare Centers
1. Determine which if any of the social service centers actually serve national populations.
These centers should not be decentralized to local governments as “own-functions”.
Instead they should continue to be considered delegated responsibilities and financed
with conditional grants, or better, made into private, non-profit institutions financed
through per client payments from the national budget.
2. The funds that currently go to centers that primarily serve the residents of the
municipalities in which they are located should be placed into the Unconditional Grant
allocated to all municipalities on a formula basis.
3. As with any Specific Transfers folded into the Unconditional Grant, the size of the grant
has to be increased be an equivalent percentage of GDP to ensure that the services are
accounted for in future years.
4. The national government should not object to the closing of centers that municipalities
have been assigned responsibility for as an own-function.
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Dormitories
A similar set of dilemmas exist with respect to school dormitories which exist in only 27
municipalities and which are currently being financed through Specific Transfers equal to about
514 million lek (6% of total Specific Transfers). 3
These dormitories were initially delegated to municipalities before Albania consolidated its local
governments. It is therefore likely that most of the pupils who initially used them came from the
surrounding communes. This is problematic because the host municipality was essentially being
asked to provide services to children whose parents voted and paid taxes in another local
government. Thus, while municipalities were legally obligated to keep these dorms open and to
spend their conditional grants on them, they had little incentive to improve conditions by
contributing their own money.
With territorial consolidation this particular problem may have been more or less resolved
because it is now likely that most of the pupils using the dormitories come from the municipality
that is responsible for financing and managing them. But there are still only 27 dorms in the
country. As a result, putting the 514 million lek of Specific Transfers that are currently earmarked
for dormitories into the part of the Unconditional Grant that allocates funds to local governments
on the basis of population and population density will cause the same sorts of problems that we
encountered with social welfare institutions: Local governments that do not have dormitories
will get money they never saw before, while those with dormitories will get much less than they
need to keep their facilities open.
But unlike with social welfare institutions, monies designed to support dormitories could be
relatively easily targeted towards those municipalities that have them and at least in theory
without discriminating against those that don’t. This is because the rules governing the
Unconditional Grant already set aside a percentage of the total grant for educational purposes
(5% of the grant or c. 1 bln lek in 2018). This part of the grant is then allocated to municipalities
on the basis of the number of primary and secondary school students in their schools.
What could be done here is to add the 514 million lek currently designated for dormitories into
Unconditional Grant by increasing the value of the grant by an equivalent percentage of the GDP.
This will ensure that financial support for this function stays in the unconditional grant going
forward. Then share of the grant earmarked for educational purposes would be increased by a
percentage of the total grant that yielded the same 500 million lek. Finally, as new coefficient
would be added to the formula that gave local governments a specific amount of money for every
student housed in a dormitory, living outside of his home in order to attend another school.
3
It is important to note that dormitories have been decentralized with Decision of the Council of Ministers in 2008
and are not included in the LSGL as an own local function
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The base calculation for the per pupil amount would be made simply by dividing the 514 mln lek
currently spent on dorms by the total number of pupils currently residing in them. Municipalities
would then get this amount multiplied by the number of students living in their dorms. The
resulting sum would inevitably differ from the amount of the Specific Transfers municipalities
currently receive, with some getting more and some getting less. But the system would be
reasonably fair. Moreover, legal provisions might be developed to allow similar per pupil
amounts to be paid to municipalities who created possibilities for students to live with local
families if they did not have dorms or if their dorms were overenrolled. As such, the system would
not discriminate against those municipalities that did not have dorms already.
But again, it should be noted that because the responsibility to provide student housing has been
assigned to municipalities as an own function, local governments would remain (legally) free to
spend whatever money they got through the grant as they saw fit. Indeed, they would remain
free to close dormitories and indeed not to provide student housing at all --though if they did
they would obviously lose their per pupil payments. Finally, if such as system is introduced, it
would be incumbent on the Ministry of Finance to introduce a budget circular that clearly defined
how the Unconditional Grant is being calculated, and in particular how much is been calculated
to support functions related to education.
Recommendations for Dormitories
1. Increase the share of the GDP used to define the Unconditional Grant by a percentage
equal to the 514 million lek currently being used to finance dormitories through Specific
Transfers.
2. Increase the share of the Unconditional Grant calculated on the basis of the number of
pupils attending schools in each municipality and add a coefficient for pupils residing in
dormitories or otherwise being housed outside of their normal place of residence in order
to attend school.
3. Calculate a base per pupil payment for students attending school outside of their place of
residence by dividing the 514 million currently being spent on dormitories by the total
number of pupils living in them.
4. Determine the student housing component of each local governments Unconditional
Grant by multiplying the number of students residing in a municipality’s dormitories (and
other forms of student housing) by the base per pupil payment.
Fire Protection, Agriculture and Irrigation, Forestry
Taken together Fire Protection (14%, 1,185 mln lek), Agriculture and Irrigation (10%, 847 mln lek)
and Forestry (3%, 276 mln lek) account for 2,308 mln of all Specific Transfers (27%). As with Social
Welfare Centers and Dormitories, the distribution of the institutions which provide the services
associated with these functions is extremely uneven.
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In 2016, there were only 39 fire stations in the country, meaning that 22 of the newly
consolidated municipalities lacked the basic infrastructure to provide the key services that had
just been made a local government own-function. To its great credit, the national government
used the three-year transition period to build 22 new fire stations in the municipalities that didn’t
have them, increase the number of staff and make several municipalities comply with the legal
standard on the number of firefighters.4
The situation in Agriculture, Irrigation, drainage and Forestry is much less clear. For these
functions we have not been able to identify a specific set of institutions that provide similar
services throughout the country. Nor have we been able to identify any inventory of the
institutions that are currently being funded by Specific Transfers. As such, it is very hard to say
what exactly these institutions do, or how unevenly the services they provide are distributed
across the country as a whole.
This of course does not mean that municipalities have all the infrastructure they need to
adequately serve their citizens. On the contrary, there has been underinvested in these sectors
for many years and it is entirely likely that no municipality really has either the capital stock or
the human resources to provide adequate services. Nor does it mean that municipalities have
similar shortcoming or deficits. What can be said, however, is that in general, the human and
capital endowments associated with these functions are inadequate, and that their current
distribution across municipalities is very uneven and unfair.
These disparities are important to understand because they bringing all municipalities up to a
similar and adequate level of service capacity represent a national challenge. And in some
respects, the transfer of these responsibilities to municipalities as own functions — like many
aspects of the decentralization process — expresses the national governments’ preference to offload some of its own problems to the local level. This is unfair. But it is not unreasonable in as
much as one believes that local knowledge and local priorities can produce better outcomes if
they are combined with some real measure of local power and locally controlled resources.
For these reasons, we think that it is desirable to fold the Specific Transfers currently used to
fund these functions into the general component of the Unconditional Grant, and to allocate
these funds more or less in accordance with the formula’s coefficients for population and
population density because both are reasonable ways to measure local governments need for
services in fire protection, irrigation, agricultural and forestry. That said it is difficult to determine
how this will impact the budgets of individual municipalities without running simulations and
adjusting coefficients to test different scenarios.
4
The report accompanying the draft-Annual Budget Laws for 2016-2018
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Recommendations for Fire Protection, Agriculture and Irrigation, Forestry
1. Increase the share of the GDP used to define the Unconditional Grant by a percentage
equal to the 2,308 million lek currently being used to finance fire protection, irrigation,
forestry and agricultural services through Specific Transfers.
2. Allocate these monies to municipalities on the basis of population and population
density because these are reasonable measures of a municipalities need for the
services.
3. Discuss with the line ministries whether there might be additional objective measures of
need that might reasonable introduced into the formula
4. Run scenarios simulating the impact of different coefficients on individual budgets to
determine whether the existing formula can be improved.
4. Local Governments, Preschool Education, and Per Pupil Funding
Preschool Education is by far the costliest responsibility that the LSGL has decentralized to
municipalities as an own-function. The wages of kindergarten teachers alone account for 42% of
all Specific Transfers (3.6 bln lek) and when combined with the wages of support staff working in
pre-schools, primary schools, and secondary schools a total of 60% of all Specific Transfers (5.2
bln lek). Because early childhood education is particularly important to Albania’s future, special
attention and effort should be made to ensure that its transfer to municipalities as an own
function, financed by freely disposable revenues works to improve the quality of the nation
kindergartens.
In many countries, financing and managing kindergartens is a local government own-function.
The main reason for this is that kindergarten attendance is rarely --if ever-- compulsory, making
the demand for kindergartens heavily subject to parental choice. As a result, national
governments often leave it up to cities and towns to determine how many kindergartens they
should run, and how they should be paid for.
Over the last few decades, however, the way people see kindergartens has changed dramatically.
Through the 1970s, nursey schools and kindergartens were seen less as educational institutions
than as institutions designed to increase female rates of labor market participation. Indeed, in
many countries, nursery schools and kindergartens were financed or run by social welfare and
labor ministries, and not ministries of education.
Since the 1980s, a huge body of scholarly literature has demonstrated that early childhood
education is particularly important for improving the educational and life chances of children
from poor or disadvantaged households. This has encouraged people to see nursery schools and
kindergartens not as labor market institutions by as integral components of the larger
educational system. Not surprisingly, national governments have become increasingly concerned
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with improving both the quality of preschools and kindergartens and access to them. As result,
in most countries national governments now regulate the basic parameters of preschool
education, including teacher qualifications, wages, and class sizes, while also promoting
enrollment through increased financial support of the sector. Thus, even in countries where
preschool education is legally considered a local government own-function, the practical realities
that arise from conceptualizing early childhood education as an integral part of the larger
educational system, make it de facto a shared function.
Overview Preschool Education in Albania
Albania inherited from its communist past a reasonably well developed national network of
kindergartens. Over the last 20 years, the GoA has struggled to maintain spending on preschool
education, which has fallen as a share of total education spending. Nonetheless, the government
has not closed preschools, and this combined with demographic decline has actually made it
possible for preschool enrollment rates to rise from about 40% in 1992 to above 60% in 2013.
This is low by European standards (c.75%) but is close to double the rate in Macedonian (29%)
and higher than the rate in Serbia and Croatia (45%), both significantly wealthier countries5.
Table 1 below shows total public spending on all levels of education by all sources in 2017. As can
be seen from the Table, about 59% (27.12 bln lek) of all public education spending went to Basic
Education, which includes both preschools and primary schools. Unfortunately, it is difficult to
determine exactly how much of all Basic Education spending goes to primary education and how
much to preschool education because the government has not introduced into the Chart of
Accounts separate program codes for each level.
Table 2: Public Spending on Education by Level and Source of Funding in 2017 (bln lek)
MoESY/
MoFE
Basic Education
Secondary Education
Vocational Education (MoEF)
University Education
Science & Sport
MoESY Budget
Total
% of Public Spending
% of GDP
19.62
6.06
Na
9.81
0.67
0.67
36.81
7.8%
2.4%
Local Spec.
Gov. Tran.
2.28
0.72
Na
3.00
0.6%
0.2%
RDF
Total
1.10 27.12
0.36 7.49
Na
Na
9.81
0.67
0.67
4.48 1.46 45.76
1.0% 0.3% 9.8%
0.3% 0.1% 2.9%
4.12
0.36
Na
% of
Educ.
Expend.
59%
16%
Na
21%
1%
1%
100%
% of
Public
Expend.
5.8%
1.6%
Na
2.1%
0.1%
0.1%
9.8%
% of
GDP
1.7%
0.5%
Na
0.6%
0.0%
0.0%
2.9%
See Mimoza Gjukotaj, “Albania: The Situation of PreUniversity Education,” (Tirana 2013), The Global Campaign
for Education, pp. 1-78 and Saber Country Report “Albania: Early Childhood Development” World Bank, Tirana
2015, pp 1-25. Gjukotaj puts the enrollment rate at 55%, the Saber report at 69%.
5
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Distinct codes for pre-school education should be introduced as soon possible because not only
is it important to know how much money is being spent on preschool education per se, but
because it will be impossible to really understand the role of local governments in the sector
unless their spending on preschools can be distinguished from their spending on primary schools.
Table 3 below presents the composition of local government education expenditure broken
down by level of education and with the Specific Transfer separated from spending funded from
the general revenues of municipal budgets. As can be seen from the Table municipalities
increased spending from their general revenues on both Basic and Secondary education at the
moment that they started receiving Specific Transfers. Why they did this is unclear. But the fact
that they did suggests that the transfer to them of new payroll obligations increased their sense
of responsibility for their schools: Approximately a third of all municipal spending on education
is now funded form their general revenues and going forward, it will be important to monitor
both the size of this contribution, and its distribution across municipalities.
Table 3: The Composition of Local Government Education Spending 2015-17 (in thsd lek)
Basic Education
Wages
Operating
Investment
Specific Transfer for Wages
Secondary Education
Wages
Operating
Investment
Specific Transfer for Wages
All Education
Wages
Operating
Investment
Specific Transfer for Wages
Source: Data from MoFE
2015
2016
2017
1,888,876
448,692
1,090,806
349,378
na
80,440
44
39,030
41,367
na
1,969,317
448,736
1,129,836
390,744
na
5,959,684
313,332
1,008,479
686,622
3,951,250
1,067,223
274,238
380,188
61,355
351,442
7,026,907
587,570
1,388,667
747,977
4,302,692
6,402,598
792,344
856,954
628,861
4,124,438
1,081,428
268,935
348,607
107,140
356,745
7,484,025
1,061,279
1,205,562
736,002
4,481,184
% of
2017
100%
12%
13%
10%
64%
100%
25%
32%
10%
33%
100%
14%
16%
10%
60%
More important, however, is what cannot be seen in the Table: From the accounts of
municipalities we cannot see how much they spent on the wages of pre-school teachers as
opposed to how much they spent on the wages of support staff in kindergartens and primary
schools. This will become increasingly important as both preschool education, and full
responsibility for maintaining primary and secondary are transformed into own-functions of local
governments. In short, both national and local governments, as well as the citizens at large, will
need to know how much is being spent on each expenditure category in order to monitor the
education policies of municipalities. Thus, and as with the distinction between pre-school and
primary education, new codes should be introduced into the Chart of Accounts so that the wages
of pedagogical workers in the school system can be distinguished from those of support staff.
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For the moment, however, we can still determine this breakdown from the descriptions of the
Specific Transfers contained in the annual budget resolution of the national government. These
descriptions tell us that in 2016, 2.93 bln lek of the Specific Transfer for Basic Education was
earmarked for the wages of kindergarten teachers, while 1 bln went to the wages support staff
working in kindergartens and primary schools (75% of 3.91 bln lek)6. By 2018, however the share
of the Specific Transfer for Basic Education that was earmarked for the wages of kindergarten
teachers had risen to 3.6 bln lek, or 78% of the Specific Transfer for Basic Education while the
same 1 bln lek was earmarked for the wages of support staff (4.63 bln lek, see Table I).
What this means is that between 2016 and 2018 the national government increased the pool of
funds earmarked for kindergarten teachers by 700 million lek or 22%. This was because the
MoESY allowed schools to hire 252 new teachers between 2016 and 2018, and MoF agreed to
fund the new position7. This increase in employment was not problematic under the current
system of Specific Transfers, because MoESY continues to be fully responsible for determining
the number of teachers employed in every school. As such, and at least for the moment, it is fair
to say that municipalities are doing little more running MoESY payroll system for kindergarten
teachers.
But this will have to change when the Specific Transfer is folded into the Unconditional Grant,
and when --as an own-function-- local governments assume greater responsibility for managing
preschools. These managerial rights can be defined in many ways, and constrained –for better
and worse-- by all sorts of sectoral regulation. But local governments cannot be said to have been
given responsibility for preschool education either as shared or own-function if MoESY remains
fully responsible for the hiring and firing kindergarten teachers, or for the opening or closing
preschools.
Most importantly, there is a fundamental contradiction between national government control
over preschool employment, and the financing of preschool education through the Unconditional
Grant. This is because the basic definition of an unconditional grant requires that local
governments be free to spend the monies they receive through them anyway they like, including
on functions other than preschool education.
To be sure, the behavior municipalities with respect to preschool education can –indeed, must-be regulated, and the fact that the law specifies that preschool education is an own-function does
not mean that local governments can do whatever they want in the sector. The national
government should determine minimum standards of service provision by –for example-defining teacher qualifications, maximum class sizes, curricula, and the physical conditions of
preschools. Rules can also be put in place that require ministerial approval of municipal decisions
to close schools, or which radically reduce the access of children to kindergartens. But the
national government can neither require municipalities to maintain existing levels of teacher
6
2016 Annex on Specific Transfers of the 2016 Annual Budget Statement of the GoA
7
Date from the Ministry of Education, Sports and Youth.
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employment, nor hire new teachers, unless it is guaranteeing the funds to pay for these services
through conditional grants. At the same time, however, and equally importantly, municipalities
cannot expect the national government to take direct responsibility for paying the wages of
teachers that are already employed in kindergartens, or for ones they would like to hire, at the
moment when the conditional funding of preschool education ends.
Instead, both levels of government must agree that to create a mechanism that ensures that the
unconditional grant allocates sufficient funds to local governments for them to provide
reasonably similar levels of preschool education to the children living in their municipalities. The
first condition of such an agreement is that at least the full value of the current monies spent on
the sector through Specific Transfers are added into the Unconditional Grant. This requires
increasing the definition of the size of the Unconditional Grant by value of these monies
expressed as their current share of the GDP.
The second, and more difficult condition requires the development of a funding formula that is
not based on the number of teachers a municipality employs but on the number of pupils
attending its schools. Indeed, developing a per-pupil funding formula for preschool education
is not only necessary to decentralize the function to local governments but part of a broader
legal obligation: According to Albania’s Basic Law on Pre-University education the funding of all
schools should be based on some sort of per pupil formula8. Unfortunately, however, this has
never been done.
So, one way to look at that current situation is to see the transfer of preschool education to local
governments, and the legal requirement to eliminate Specific Transfers as an opportune moment
to begin a process that probably should have started long ago. Secondly, developing a per-pupil
funding formula for preschool education is also necessary: Falling birthrates, emigration, and
rapid urbanization have radically changed the demand for schools and teachers across the
country as whole and their current geographic distribution is now poorly aligned with where
most people actually live and need to be served. Per pupil formulas are designed to prevent this
sort of situation be ensuring that resources follow enrollment, and not where teachers are
currently employed.
The new per pupil formula, however must be weighted so that it takes into account the fact that
in mountainous and sparsely populated areas preschool classes will be smaller than in urban
centers, and that as a result the per pupil costs of providing the service will be higher.
The use of a per pupil formula to allocate unconditional funds to local governments will
necessarily result in municipalities receiving different levels of funding than they currently
receive through Specific Transfers. It is thus extremely important that the formula be clear and
8
Article 37 of the 2012 Law on Pre-University Education reads: The financing from the state budget shall be
scheduled based on the formula "per student", in accordance with the separate indicators of the educational levels
and conditions of the public educational institutions.
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transparent, and that the national government inform each municipality of the exact amount of
money that has been calculated to support preschool education, and which they will receive as
part of their Unconditional Grants.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it must be understood that while per pupil formulas can
be designed to mimic an existing allocation of funding, they cannot reproduce it entirely. In short,
in some cases there will be quite significant differences between what a municipality received
through Specific Transfers and what it should receive through the new formula. A number of
different strategies, however, can be used to prevent adjustment shock. The simplest and most
systemic is for the national government to increase the size of the pool of funds calculated to
support preschool education. Other strategies include phasing in the formula over a number of
years, and/or setting aside reserve funds for municipalities whose conditions are so exceptional
that it is clear that they will not be able to provide reasonable levels of preschool service without
exceptional national government support.
5. The Specific Challenges of Developing a Per-Pupil Formula for
Preschool Education in Albania Today
To better understand the challenges of developing and implementing a per pupil system of
preschool finance in Albania today, it is necessary to look a little closer at the effects of the
existing system of funding kindergartens. In particular, it is necessary to examine the disparities
in both the access to, and the quality of preschool education across the country as a whole
because these disparities at once illustrate why moving to per pupil funding is both increasingly
necessary and difficult.
Pre-school enrollment rates in Albania range somewhere between 55 and 70 percent of all 3-5
year-olds depending on who is doing the estimate.9 This is well below the average for the
European Union, but nonetheless surprisingly high for a poor country, and significantly higher
than some of Albania’s immediate neighbors (e.g. Macedonia).10
Unfortunately, however, there are no official assessments of preschool enrollment rates by
municipality. This situation should be corrected by MoESY and Instat because monitoring changes
in the access to preschool education will become increasingly important as the function is
decentralized to local governments. There is however, good data on the number of pupils
attending all types of public schools in every municipality, as well as the number of teachers those
schools employ.
9
See footnote 5 and for comparison with other European countries
10
EuroStat http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=educ_uoe_enrp07&lang=en
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In the following we use pupils per teacher as a crude measure of school quality 11, and preschool
pupils as a percentage of total pupils as a proxy measure for enrollment rates and access. So the
higher percentage of preschool pupils is to total pupils, the better we consider the access to
preschool education is. Table 4 below, presents both these measures for the 10 municipalities
with the lowest levels of preschool access in the country (left hand side of the table) and the ten
municipalities with highest levels of access (right hand side of the table).
Table 4: Municipalities with the Highest and Lowest Rates of Access to Preschools in 2015-16
Shkodër
Pupils
in
Public
Schools
19,876
2,140
Preschool
Pupils as
% of All
Pupils
10.8%
16.1
Local
Gov's with
Most
Access
Vorë
737
Preschool
Pupils as
% of All
Pupils
20.4%
Durrës
30,892
3,432
11.1%
22.7
Memaliaj
1,901
397
20.9%
11.0
Belsh
3,371
403
12.0%
13.9
Gjirokastër
4,725
1,010
21.4%
12.3
Local Gov's
with Least
Access
Pupils
in
Public
Schools
3,604
Pupils in
Public
Preschool
Pupils
per
Teacher
17.5
1,396
171
12.2%
8.6
Himarë
1,201
258
21.5%
17.2
2,840
12.7%
27.3
Devoll
4,510
976
21.6%
15.5
4,959
652
13.1%
12.3
Konispol
922
200
21.7%
25.0
11,763
1,550
13.2%
31.6
Libohovë
542
128
23.6%
25.6
1,716
431
25.1%
11.6
657
182
27.7%
18.2
88
33.6%
12.6
MalësiEMadhe
Krujë
Pupils
per
Teacher
22,382
FusheArrëz
Kamëz
Pupils in
Public
Preschool
Tirane
93,080
12,297
13.2%
25.4
Tepelenë
Peqin
4,427
593
13.4%
15.2
Finiq
Tropojë
4,482
619
13.8%
13.8
Pustec
262
20,040
4,407
22.0%
14.4
491,601
76,627
15.6%
18.4
Total Group
196,628
24,697
12.6%
22.3 Total Group
Albania
491,601
76,627
15.6%
18.4
Albania
Source MoESY data
As can be seen from the table, many of the ten municipalities with the lowest level of access to
public preschools are among the largest municipalities in the country, and collectively they
represent almost a third of all preschool students. Meanwhile, the ten municipalities with the
highest levels of access are all relatively small, collectively representing just over 10% of all
preschool pupils. Moreover, the difference in access between the two groups is very significant,
with preschool pupils representing only 12.6% of all pupils in the low access municipalities
compared to 22.0% in high access municipalities.
Indeed, if we assume that the national enrollment rate is 55%, and that this is more or less equal
to the national average of our proxy rate for access –that 15.6% of all public-school pupils attend
preschool—then it seems that about 44% of 3-5 year olds who attend preschools in low access
municipalities, while about 77% attend them in high access municipalities. And while not all the
low access municipalities are large -indeed a few of them like Fushe Arrez and Belsh are quite
11
Measuring the quality of educational institutions is always difficult, and pupil teacher ratios (class sizes) alone
obviously tell us nothing about other important factors like facilities, equipment and teacher qualifications.
Nonetheless, it should be clear that municipalities with average class sizes two or three times than those of other
similar local governments cannot be said to be providing preschool education at a similar standard to those of their
peers.
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small-- what is most striking about the table is that access to preschool education seems to be
most problematic in some of Albania’s largest municipalities, including Tirana.
This is unusual because in most countries access to preschool education is significantly higher in
urban jurisdictions than it is in rural ones. In Poland, for example, the national enrollment rate
for preschool education is about the same as in Albania (c. 60%). But enrolment rates in cities are
much higher (c. 80%) than in more rural areas (c. 40%) --so more or less the opposite of what we
see in Albania.
The data on pupil teacher ratios –class sizes-- is less surprising but still revealing. As can be seen
from the table, class sizes are higher than the national average in most but not all of the low
access municipalities, while they are significantly lower than the national average in most of the
high access municipalities. This is more or less what one would expect because it is hard to
transport small children over large distances in sparsely populated or mountainous jurisdictions.
Nonetheless, a few aspects of the class size data are curious. First, there are a number of small,
high access local governments with average classes that are surprisingly large (Konispol, Libhove,
Finiq). What is going on here is unclear. It could be that in these municipalities there are one or
two preschools in the town center with extremely large classes, and then smaller facilities in a
few rural areas. But the situation in these local governments is obviously very different than in
the small, but very high access town of Pustec where classes are half the size, or from the small
but very low access Fushe Arrez where classes average only 8.6 pupils per teacher –meaning that
there are almost certainly classes in which there are 3 or 4 children.
The other important aspect of this data is simply that in a number of large primarily urban
municipalities the average class size is over 25 pupils. Such classes are probably already too large
for kindergartens to really be preschools, and instead are really functioning as social welfare
institutions that make it possible for both parents to work. And again, if the average is 25 or 30
pupils per teacher, this means that in these municipalities there must be a significant number of
classes that have well over 35 pupils.
In short, the data suggests two things. First, Albania has not been able to adjust the distribution
of its preschools --or the teachers working in them-- to the growth of at least some of its most
important urban centers. And second, a combination of migration, demographic decline, and the
historically uneven distribution of schools and teachers has produced a complicated and unclear
pattern of both access and quality that has left some municipalities with many preschools and
teachers, but few students, while others have been less fortunate.
Further research into the actual distribution of schools and teachers may yield evidence that
these at least some of these apparently arbitrary patterns are being driven by underlying forces
that need to be teased out of the data. But at the moment, much of what is seems to be going
on here resembles a variation of the fire-station problem that we have discussed earlier. In short,
the national government has been unable to provide many areas of the country with
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reasonably similar levels of preschool services, and these disparities are now going to be
decentralized to local government.
These disparities are clearly unfair and should be corrected over time. Indeed, in theory the
national government might take it upon itself to equalize both access to preschool education and
its quality before transferring the function to municipalities. This however is unlikely and
probably undesirable: Unlikely because the national government doesn’t have the funds
necessary for the task, and undesirable because local governments almost certainly have a better
idea where underutilized facilities can be closed or consolidated, and where new ones ought to
be built and staffed. Indeed, while difficult and painful, this precisely why a system of per pupil
finance is necessary: Without money flowing to local governments on the basis of a more
objective measure of need, municipalities with low access and large classes will have little chance
to meet the growing needs of their citizens, while municipalities with high access and small
classes will have little reason to adjust their school networks to meet falling demand.
Table 5 below, presents the same measures of preschool access and class sizes for all
municipalities, as well as the value of their Specific Grants for teachers’ wages expressed in both
per teacher and per pupil amounts. The table illustrates in financial terms the general –but not
universal trend—of under-providing preschool services in large more urban municipalities, as
well as the harder to explain patterns of service provision elsewhere. Municipalities in the table
are ranked by the amount of Specific Transfers they received expressed in per pupil terms in
2015-16, with those who received most appearing at the top of the table, and those who received
least at the bottom.
As can be seen from the table, all municipalities received the same amount of funding per
teacher. This is exactly what we would expect, and at the same time precisely the phenomena
that cannot be reproduced at the moment that Specific Transfers are folded into the
Unconditional Grant. Or put another way, ending Specific Transfers for preschool education will
necessarily change the existing allocation of funds in the sector. The question therefore is not
whether some municipalities will receive more or less money than before, because this is
inevitable. Instead, the question is on what basis they should receive this money, and whether
the amounts they receive are sufficiently similar to what the currently get so that over time they
can rationally adjust how they use teachers and facilities to best meet the needs of their citizens.
Coming up with such a formula will not be easy. In part this is because in general smaller
municipalities receive two to three times the amount of funding per pupil (60-80,000 lek) than
many more urban jurisdictions do (25-35,000 lek. But if this was the only problem, a reasonable
if not perfect solution could be found by providing significantly more money per pupil to all small
and sparsely populated local governments, as most per pupil funding formulas do.
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Table 5: The Specific Transfer for Preschool Teachers’ Wages in Per Pupil Terms: 20152016
Municipality
Fushe Arrëz
Skrapar
Kolonjë
Poliçan
Mirditë
Memaliaj
Pukë
Dropull
Përmet
Tepelenë
Gramsh
Delvinë
Malësi E Madhe
Gjirokastër
Pustec
Korçë
Mat
Tropojë
Belsh
Librazhd
Mallakastër
Shijak
Peqin
Kuçovë
Devoll
Kavajë
Dibër
Shkodër
Berat
Cërrik
Bulqizë
Himarë
Lushnje
Fier
Vorë
Pogradec
Has
Këlcyrë
Elbasan
Finiq
Patos
Klos
Kurbin
Sarandë
Maliq
Vau-Dejes
Kukës
Rrogozhinë
Pupils in
Public
Preschools
Preshool
Pupils as %
of All
Pupils
Preschool
Teachers
Pupils per
Teacher
171
335
313
269
510
397
300
34
273
431
950
266
652
1,010
88
2,212
832
619
403
1,150
872
696
593
939
976
1,128
2,007
2,140
1,893
791
955
258
2,607
3,216
737
2,485
564
160
4,138
182
713
471
1,490
889
1,410
653
1,651
644
12.2%
15.1%
19.1%
17.8%
14.2%
20.9%
14.9%
14.1%
16.4%
25.1%
19.1%
18.6%
13.1%
21.4%
33.6%
19.4%
15.0%
13.8%
12.0%
18.2%
17.2%
16.7%
13.4%
17.0%
21.6%
16.1%
15.8%
10.8%
18.1%
17.2%
14.5%
21.5%
18.8%
16.8%
20.4%
20.3%
14.7%
15.5%
16.9%
27.7%
17.8%
14.5%
15.6%
17.5%
19.9%
14.7%
14.9%
16.4%
20
39
35
29
52
36
27
3
24
37
80
22
53
82
7
174
63
45
29
81
58
46
39
61
63
71
125
133
114
47
56
15
150
184
42
141
32
9
228
10
38
25
78
43
67
31
77
29
8.6
8.6
8.9
9.3
9.8
11.0
11.1
11.3
11.4
11.6
11.9
12.1
12.3
12.3
12.6
12.7
13.2
13.8
13.9
14.2
15.0
15.1
15.2
15.4
15.5
15.9
16.1
16.1
16.6
16.8
17.1
17.2
17.4
17.5
17.5
17.6
17.6
17.8
18.1
18.2
18.8
18.8
19.1
20.7
21.0
21.1
21.4
22.2
Specific
Grant for
Preschool
Teacher
Wages
14,125
27,543
24,718
20,481
36,724
25,424
19,068
2,119
16,950
26,131
56,499
15,537
37,430
57,911
4,944
122,885
44,493
31,781
20,481
57,205
40,962
32,487
27,543
43,080
44,493
50,143
88,279
93,929
80,511
33,193
39,549
10,594
105,935
129,947
29,662
99,579
22,599
6,356
161,021
7,062
26,837
17,656
55,086
30,368
47,318
21,893
54,380
20,481
USAID PLANNING AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE PROJECT
DRAFT-POLICY BRIEF: FINANCING THE NEW OWN FUNCTIONS OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENTS IN ALBANIA
Value of
Grant per
Teacher
Value of
Grant Per
Pupil
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
82,600
82,218
78,972
76,137
72,008
64,041
63,561
62,315
62,086
60,628
59,472
58,410
57,409
57,338
56,178
55,554
53,477
51,342
50,821
49,743
46,974
46,676
46,447
45,879
45,587
44,453
43,986
43,892
42,531
41,963
41,413
41,060
40,635
40,406
40,247
40,072
40,070
39,726
38,913
38,804
37,639
37,486
36,971
34,160
33,559
33,527
32,938
31,802
22
Durrës
Përrenjas
Selenicë
Vlorë
Divjakë
Lezhë
Roskovec
Konispol
Tirane
Libohovë
Ura Vajgurore
Kamëz
Krujë
Total Republic
3,432
825
484
3,299
1,111
2,410
564
200
12,297
128
1,014
2,840
1,550
76,627
11.1%
15.8%
17.4%
19.4%
16.9%
19.6%
14.6%
21.7%
13.2%
23.6%
18.4%
12.7%
13.2%
15.6%
151
36
21
141
47
99
23
8
485
5
39
104
49
4,158
22.7
22.9
23.0
23.4
23.6
24.3
24.5
25.0
25.4
25.6
26.0
27.3
31.6
18.4
106,641
25,424
14,831
99,579
33,193
69,917
16,243
5,650
342,523
3,531
27,543
73,448
34,605
2,936,519
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
706,233
31,073
30,817
30,642
30,185
29,877
29,011
28,800
28,249
27,854
27,587
27,163
25,862
22,326
38,322
Source: Specific Transfer data MoFE, enrollment and teacher data MoESY
But this is not the only or most difficult problem that needs to be resolved. Instead, the real
difficulties lie in the fact that their seem to be many jurisdictions that at least on the face of it
seem to be structurally similar, but yet receive very different levels of per pupil funding. For
example, it is hard to explain why Korce should receive 55,500 lek per pupil –and have both
significantly smaller classes and greater access—than Shkoder which receives only 43,000 lek per
pupil. Or why Libohove receives only 27,000 lek per pupil and has huge class while Pustec get
57,000 lek per pupil and has classes half the size.
To be sure, further research and analysis may reveal differences across apparently similar
municipalities that could reasonably be integrated into the coefficients used to weight a per pupil
formula. For example, it may be that Korce as a municipality has a smaller urban core, and more
far flung villages than Skhoder does, making it possible to refine the formula to take into account
the settlement structure within municipalities. But it is impossible that even an extremely
sophisticated formula will be able to account for the kinds of disparities that can be seen in the
data because most of these disparities are not driven by any objective measure of need, but by
a combination of once more or less rational decisions made by different ministries of education
Albania’s rapidly changing demographics.
Indeed, in this situation it may well be better, to develop a rather simple and transparent per
pupil formula, and to phase it in over a period of five to seven years. Technically, this is relatively
easy to do. But it must be done openly and transparently and most importantly in ways that allow
municipalities to reasonably plan for the loss or increase in revenues that system will entail for
them. Such planning will require MoFE and MoESY to prepare, disseminate and discuss better
information about both the finances of the sector over time, as well as the analysis of
demographic trends at work in municipalities across the country.
At the same time, municipalities must be given the managerial powers necessary for them to
slowly adjust both their school networks and the number of teachers they employ. This will
require giving them the power to set school budgets, to have some control over the closure of
underutilized facilities, and perhaps the right to experiment with fees for households that can
afford them. It will also require support from the national government, both in terms of training
USAID PLANNING AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE PROJECT
DRAFT-POLICY BRIEF: FINANCING THE NEW OWN FUNCTIONS OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENTS IN ALBANIA
23
and access to at least some of the capital that will be needed to adjust school networks to the
needs of the country’s families.
Recommendations for Preschools Education
1. Increase the share of the GDP used to define the Unconditional Grant by a percentage
equal to at least the full value of all Specific Transfers for education, meaning not only
those currently earmarked for the wages preschool teachers but the wages of support
staff in primary and secondary schools.
2. Agree with local governments that this share will be periodically reviewed and adjusted
upward as preschool enrollment increases.
3. Increase the percentage of the Unconditional Transfer calculated to support local
government education responsibilities allocated on a per pupil basis by at least the value
of the amount of new money put into the Unconditional Grant for education.
4. Conduct further research on the demographic and settlement patterns that might be
used to adjust the coefficients used to allocate money on a per pupil basis, and develop
a simple, more equitable formula for allocating education monies through the
Unconditional Transfer.
5. Develop procedures to phase in the formula over a period of 5 to 7 years so that local
government have time to adjust to the new system of allocation.
6. Develop a budget circular for the Unconditional Grant that informs all municipalities of
how (the education components of) their grants have been calculated –including
enrolment numbers and explanations of coefficients and phase in provision—and which
also includes reasonable projections of what they will receive per pupil in future years.
7. Have MoF and INSTAT calculate preschool enrollment rates for all municipalities as well
as projections of the number of 3-5 year olds that will be entering the school system
over the next three to five years. Discuss the implications of this data with local
governments.
8. Carefully review the Draft Law on Preschool Education, paying particular attention to
the rights and obligations it gives local governments to set school budgets, hire, fire, and
pay teachers bonuses, open and close facilities, transport students, provide meals and
set fees for kindergartens.
9. Discuss these rights and obligations with local governments and ensure that they have
enough managerial and financial power to actually adjust preschool networks and
teacher employment to meet the changing needs of their citizens.
USAID PLANNING AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE PROJECT
DRAFT-POLICY BRIEF: FINANCING THE NEW OWN FUNCTIONS OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENTS IN ALBANIA
24
U.S. Agency for International Development
Planning and Local Governance Project in Albania
St. Dervish Hima
3 Towers near Qemal Stafa Stadium
Tower No. 1, Apt. 91, Tenth Floor
Tirana, Albania
Tel: + 355-04-450-4150
Fax: + 355-04-450-4149
www.usaid.gov
www.plgp.al