The Bank of Albania with the Center of Excellence in Finance (CEF) initiated a one-and-a-half day workshop to be held in Tirana, Albania, on December 3 and 4, 2009. This workshop will address challenges associated with policy design and policy anchoring with a particular focus on building individual and institutional capacities in this very important area. The workshop will be financed by the European Commission’s TAIEX instrument.

As economies in Southeast Europe and Turkey pursue sustainable growth within the EU Accession and Convergence frameworks, they face important challenges in building implementation capacity. The need to adopt policies that allow for an orderly recovery from the present financial and economic crisis underline the importance of development of strongly anchored medium-term economic and fiscal programs to re-establish credibility and confidence of countries in the region.

For these economies, a natural policy anchor is the EU Accession and Convergence framework. However, it is unclear whether all countries have adequately developed internal strategic policy development, coordination and implementation processes which will allow them to fully benefit from the EU anchor as they prepare their integrated medium-term economic programs.

The workshop is a follow-up to the seminar Economic Stability and EU Convergence in Southeast Europe: Building Capacities for Policy Design and Implementation held in April 2009 in Washington at the margins of the IMF and the World Bank Spring Meetings. At the seminar senior country officials, together with regional experts, IMF, European Commission and CEF representatives discussed the main priorities and challenges in terms of designing a framework to further improve policy design and implementation capacity over the short to medium-term.

• Background and minutes of the Economic Stability and EU Convergence in Southeast Europe: Building Capacities for Policy Design and Implementation.pdf