Albanian defence expenditure has experienced a steady increase since 2017, with the exception of 2020, when spending on defence stagnated.
This stagnation can be attributed to the fight against the pandemic. Even though it has not reached the NATO goal of 2% of GDP, the defence expenditure’s share of Albania’s total government expenditure increased from 4.5% in 2017 to almost 9% that was planned for 2022.
2021
Share of GDP 1.38%
Share of total government
expenditure 6.82%
The Albanian defence budget does not tend to change much in the course of a year, staying within the envisaged budget (+- 4%). In fact, it is usually slightly underspent.
The Albanian defence budget is the least transparent and detailed in the region, as it shows only several gene-ral categories: Planning, Management and Administration, Combat Forces, Military Education, Combat Support and Health Support. Hence, the budget structure and the
amounts spent on personnel, or arms and equipment, remain inconclusive from publicly available information. Data provided to NATO show that the gradual rise of Albanian defence expenditure can be attributed to small increases in the arms and equipment spending each year.
* Data for 2021 and 2022 are based on the last changes in the 2021 budgets and the initial budget laws for 2022.
- Albanian budget structure graph is designed with the information from the NATO database. Since it could not be derived from the government balance sheets or budgets due to the highly aggregated stucture of the documents, it should not be directly compared with the budget structure of other countries in this report.