TIRANA, Oct. 9 /ATA-By Maela Marini/ – Albania ranks first in the region for public administration reform, according to the European Union-backed SIGMA assessment, Prime Minister Edi Rama said on Friday as he presented a new initiative aimed at strengthening merit-based recruitment and career advancement in the civil service.
Rama said the transformation of Albania’s public administration had been reflected in assessments by several international institutions, adding that the country needed to take meritocracy to a new level.
He said he had initially been sceptical about the potential to improve the quality of the administration, but was pleasantly surprised by its contribution to EU accession negotiations and the positive assessment it received from Brussels.
“The work of Albania’s large team of representatives across all the negotiating chapters revealed a completely different public administration from the one I had imagined,” Rama said, attributing his earlier doubts partly to persistent negative media coverage of individual public employees.
The government head also referred to recent public protests, saying demands for merit-based recruitment reflected accumulated concerns as Albania moved from an era of scarcity to one of higher expectations.
“One of the most striking issues raised was precisely merit – how people enter public service in line with their ambition to serve the Albanian state,” he said.
Rama described SIGMA as an instrument used by the EU to assess the quality, needs and potential of public administrations. He said its findings placed Albania first in the region for public administration reform and improvements.
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