The contract between generations in Albania, paid twice

 

Abstract

The European Commission’s Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness (2026) gives institutional form to an idea with a long lineage in political philosophy and economics: society is a contract between generations. This paper assembles a working definition of intergenerational fairness from that lineage, from Burke’s partnership across generations to Rawls’s just savings principle, Heckman’s economics of timing and Lee and Mason’s generational accounting, and traces the concept into the Union’s emerging policy framework. It then argues that Albania makes the condition of the contract unusually visible. Drawing exclusively on official evidence, the Albanian census, European Commission enlargement reports, the World Bank Human Capital Index and Public Finance Review, the paper documents a generational balance in which the costs of building human capability are borne by families and the state while a growing share of the returns is realized abroad. Albanian households frequently pay twice: once to raise and educate a child, and once to finance that child’s departure. The paper positions intergenerational fairness as the continuation of the human capital agenda. Human capital established that spending on people is investment; intergenerational fairness asks who finances that investment, who benefits from it, and whether the resulting balance is one that all generations could accept. Rather than proposing a new policy sector, it offers an organizing framework through which demographic change, public finance, human capital, territorial development and European integration can be governed as parts of the same long-term contract.

 

I. The contract between generations

On 4 March 2026 the European Commission adopted its first Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness.[1] The document is organised around a single idea, which the Commission calls the intergenerational contract: the commitment that decisions taken today must ensure a fair balance of benefits and burdens across current and future generations.[2] The contract rests on three pillars. Fair policymaking asks that legislation be tested for its effects on the young and the unborn, through a youth check and strategic foresight tools. Fair opportunities asks that age not operate as a barrier at any stage of life. Fair places asks that the region where a person is born should not define that person’s future.[3]

To hold the contract to account, the strategy commits the Commission to an intergenerational fairness index measuring how well countries protect the prospects of younger and future generations, a future-oriented policymaking package for public administrations, a dedicated demography forum, and a progress report due in 2028.[4]

The idea is far older than the document. Edmund Burke described society in 1790 as a partnership “between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”[5] John Rawls gave the idea analytic form in 1971 through the just savings principle: each generation owes its successors a fair equivalent of what it received from its predecessors.[6] James Heckman supplied the economics: returns to investment in people are highest in early childhood and decline with age, so the timing of public spending across a life determines how much capability a society builds.[7] Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason supplied the accounting. Their National Transfer Accounts measure how resources actually flow between ages in an economy, who produces, who consumes and who finances whom, turning the contract between generations into an object of measurement rather than rhetoric.[8]

Arranged in sequence, these sources already contain the definition. Intergenerational fairness is the condition in which the contract between generations holds: each generation receives an inheritance of institutions, capabilities and resources at least equivalent to the one it was given, and public decisions distribute benefits and burdens across time in a way that all generations, present and future, could accept. The definition is assembled, not invented. Burke names the parties, Rawls states the obligation, Heckman prices the timing, and Lee and Mason keep the books.

Two lines must be drawn at the outset. Intergenerational fairness is not a policy for the young. The contract has all generations as parties: children whose capabilities are being formed, working adults who finance transfers in both directions at once, older people whose pensions and care embody promises already made, and residents not yet born whose inheritance is being decided now. The European strategy takes exactly this lifecycle scope.[9] Nor is the framework an argument for spending less on the old: a contract that defaults on its oldest parties teaches every younger party what its promises are worth. The test is whether the balance across all generations is one that each could accept, and the frame is useful precisely because it holds the whole set of promises on one page, where their consistency can be examined. Each line guards against a trap. Narrowed to the young, it becomes youth policy, which one ministry can own and every other can ignore. Turned against the old, it becomes generational conflict, which hands the debate to whoever is already best organised to win it. The definition holds only if both lines hold.

Figure 1. The contract between generations. Adapted from the European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness (2026), and Lee and Mason, Population Aging and the Generational Economy (2011).

II. From Human Capital to Intergenerational Fairness

The concept does not arrive in a vacuum. For a generation, development policy has been organised around human capital: the stock of health, skills and knowledge embodied in people. The World Bank’s Human Capital Index, launched in 2018, turned that agenda into a single number by measuring how much productivity a child born today can expect to attain by age eighteen, given the health and education conditions prevailing in the country of birth.[10] The index settled a proposition that no serious government now contests: spending on people is investment.

What the human capital agenda established, it did not complete. An index of expected productivity says how much capability a country builds. It does not say who finances that capability, who captures its returns, or when. A society can score respectably on human capital while shifting the costs of building it onto families and the returns from it onto other countries. Intergenerational fairness completes the human capital agenda by adding the missing dimension. It asks who pays and who benefits, across time. It is human capital with a distributional spine.

The two frames are formally linked. The Commission’s strategy builds on the instruments the human capital agenda produced: the European Child Guarantee, the reinforced Youth Guarantee, the European Care Strategy, the Union of Skills and a forthcoming Longevity Roadmap.[11] The stitching is already under way. The Commission is preparing a Toolkit to connect the European Child Guarantee with the Youth Guarantee, so that support follows a person from childhood into early adulthood instead of stopping at the boundary between two schemes.[12] The Intergenerational Fairness Index will do for the contract between generations what the Human Capital Index did for capability: convert a principle into a comparable number with a publication date.

Seen in sequence, the relationship is straightforward. Human capital development established that investment in people is investment in national prosperity. Intergenerational fairness asks the next question that investment inevitably raises: whether the society that finances the investment is also the society that benefits from it, and whether the balance between generations remains one that all parties to the contract could reasonably accept. The second concept does not replace the first. It completes it.

III. Albania: where the contract is most visible

Every European country now debates fairness between generations. This is the Albanian question – can a country become prosperous by continually exporting the generation whose capabilities it has financed? Or, stated in the language of the contract between generations, can a society remain fair when the costs of building capability are borne at home while an increasing share of the returns is realised elsewhere? Few European countries display the question as clearly as Albania.

Albania is the country where the condition of the contract can be read directly from official statistics. The 2023 Population and Housing Census counted 2,402,113 residents, roughly 420,000 fewer than in 2011.[13] The average age rose from 35.3 to 42.5 years over the same twelve years; one resident in five is now aged 65 or over, against one in nine in 2011.[14] The total fertility rate stood at 1.21 children per woman in 2022, among the lowest in Europe.[15] Births exceeded deaths by roughly 88,000 between the two censuses, so the decline is not natural change. Set the natural increase against the recorded fall and approximately half a million people left the country in twelve years, from a population of under three million.[16]

These are the numbers of a contract under strain, and the strain has a direction. Emigration at this rate is not an anomaly of temperament; it is a measurable response to terms. A young person weighing whether to stay compares what the contract offers at home, in education, in services, in the prospects that effort can be expected to earn, with what other countries offer, and acts on the comparison. The census records the result.

Two further measurements complete the record. The diaspora now exceeds half of the resident population, and surveys find that half of those who remain are considering leaving. The contract is being weighed not only by those who have left but inside every household still in the country, and the weighing is continuous.

The choice of language for these numbers is itself a policy decision. Albanian public discourse reads them as demographic catastrophe, and the catastrophe frame has a known career: it produces fatalism, fatalism produces resignation, and resignation feeds the very departures it laments. The contract frame reads the same figures differently. A catastrophe is suffered; a contract is renegotiated. To call the census a record of broken terms is to assert that the terms can be rewritten, and to raise the question of who rewrites them.

The same records carry a more particular observation. Albanian families invest in raising and educating their children, and then, in large numbers, finance the next step as well: the ticket, the tuition abroad, the first year of rent in another country. The costs of forming a person are borne at home; the returns accrue elsewhere. That is the contract between generations operating in reverse. The oldest transfer in any society runs from parents to children in the expectation that capability built at home will be exercised at home. When households pay twice, once to raise a child and once to place that child abroad, the reversal is complete.

The population figures describe the outcome. What they do not yet show is the part written each year in the state’s own accounts.

IV. The budget as a generational ledger

Lee and Mason’s method treats a public budget as a set of transfers between ages. Every tax and every programme moves resources from one stage of life to another; summed, the flows show which generations a state invests in and which it draws on.[17] The method carries no accusation. It is bookkeeping. Applied to Albania through the published record, it reads as follows.

On the investment side, the European Commission’s 2025 enlargement report on Albania records public spending on education at 2.1 per cent of GDP in 2023 and an estimated 2.6 per cent in 2024, against an EU average of 4.6 per cent.[18]Within that total, the World Bank’s 2025 Public Finance Review finds spending on early childhood education, the stage at which Heckman’s returns are highest, at 0.08 per cent of GDP, roughly ten times below the OECD average, with about one child in ten under the age of three enrolled in a public crèche.[19]

Figure 2. The investment side of the ledger. Sources: European Commission, Albania 2025 Report, SWD (2025) 750 final; World Bank, Albania Public Finance Review (2025).

On the outcome side, the World Bank’s Human Capital Index puts Albania at 0.63: a child born in Albania today can expect to reach 63 per cent of the productivity that full health and complete education would allow.[20] The Bank’s socioeconomic disaggregation of the index sharpens the picture: expected human capital for children in the poorest fifth of households stands near 0.50, against 0.64 for the wealthiest fifth.[21] The OECD’s PISA assessment for 2022 recorded Albanian fifteen-year-olds at 368 points in mathematics, 69 points below 2018 and the steepest decline recorded in that cycle.[22]

On the drawing side, the same Public Finance Review reports that only 46 per cent of the working-age population contributes to the pension system, that the average pension equals 32 per cent of the contributory wage, and that by 2060 up to 34 per cent of Albanians could be above retirement age.[23] The International Monetary Fund’s Article IV consultations project social insurance outlays rising from 2026 onward in line with pension financing needs, and identify demographic shifts as a principal fiscal challenge beyond 2030.[24] The drawing side also has a present tense. Social insurance absorbs 7.3 per cent of GDP, a share that rises mechanically as the population ages. Education receives 2.1 per cent. The state commits far more to the years in which capability is drawn down than to the years in which it is formed.

Set side by side, the entries describe a generational balance tilted toward the present. Little goes into the years in which capability is formed; growing amounts are committed to the years in which it is drawn down; and the cohort that would carry the difference is the one leaving. None of these figures belongs to this paper. They belong to the Commission, the World Bank, the Fund and the Albanian state’s own statistical office, and each can be checked at its source. The ledger assigns no motive. It records allocation, and allocation is a decision that can be revised.

The reading above is assembled from separate documents. The National Transfer Accounts method exists so that no such assembly is needed. More than sixty countries maintain generational accounts that show, in one consistent framework, how each age group finances and is financed by the others.[25] Albania is not yet among them[26]. A national exercise would be feasible with existing INSTAT survey and administrative data,[27] and it would replace assembly with measurement: the term generational balance would acquire an annual, auditable content, produced by the state’s own statisticians rather than inferred from the reports of its partners. It is also the kind of instrument the forthcoming intergenerational fairness index is designed to reward.

A ledger, however, does not implement itself. Budgets record decisions; institutions turn those decisions into services, opportunities and outcomes. The contract between generations is honoured not only by allocating resources but by possessing the administrative capacity to convert resources into capability. State capacity is the mechanism through which generational fairness becomes observable in everyday life.

This makes institutional quality part of the contract itself. Where public institutions are capable, investment made in childhood is more likely to mature into productive adulthood. Where they are weak, even well-intended expenditure loses part of its value. The contract between generations is financed through the budget, but fulfilled through institutions.

V. Fair places

The third pillar of the European strategy translates into one sentence: the place of birth must not determine the future.[28] In Albania the sentence meets the census map. Nearly a third of the resident population, 31.6 per cent, now lives in the prefecture of Tirana, up from 26.8 per cent in 2011.[29] At the two extremes of the country, Kukës records the highest share of children relative to the working-age population and the lowest share of elderly; Gjirokastër records the reverse.[30] Between them, population thins toward the capital and the coast.

Behind the map stands the question of services. A contract between generations is honoured or broken locally: in the crèche that exists or does not, the school that keeps its teachers or loses them, the health post within reach or beyond it. Where services follow population out of a territory, the children who remain inherit a thinner state precisely where they need a thicker one. The strategy’s answer, place-based action in partnership with local and regional authorities, presumes local institutions with the scale and staff to act.[31] For Albania this connects intergenerational fairness directly to the organisation of local government. The capacity of municipalities to deliver services at the standard the contract requires is one of the contract’s terms.

VI. Accession and the European fairness test

The strategy is addressed to member states, but not only to them. Candidate countries are invited to take part in its actions wherever possible.[32] For Albania, in accession negotiations, the practical meaning is that the European test of fairness between generations arrives with dates attached. The intergenerational fairness index will be compiled and published. The progress report is due in 2028. A country negotiating entry will be measured by the same instrument as the countries it is joining.

The test does not stand alone. Around the strategy, the Union has assembled within fifteen months a connected body of commitments. The European Child Guarantee of 2021 was strengthened in May 2026 as part of the first EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, which sets the ambition of helping to eradicate poverty in the Union by 2050.[33] The reinforced Youth Guarantee has committed member states since 2020 to an offer of employment, education or training for every person under thirty within four months.[34] The Union of Skills, adopted in 2025, and the European Care Deal announced for 2027 extend the same architecture to skills and to care.[35] Above the European level, the United Nations adopted the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations in September 2024, committing member states to weigh the interests of those not yet born.[36] None of these documents was written for Albania; all of them will apply to it.

Fair policymaking, the first pillar, already has working precedents. Germany has operated a youth check since 2017: every federal bill is screened for its effects on people aged 12 to 27 by a dedicated competence centre, and the findings enter the legislative record.[37] In OECD comparison, only four countries carry out such an ex-ante assessment.[38] The Commission’s strategy now moves the instrument toward the European mainstream. A state preparing for membership can adopt the practice before it is asked to.

One property of accession deserves to be stated plainly, because it sets the stakes. Membership does not redesign a country’s internal arrangements; it locks in and scales the arrangements it finds. The funds, the mobility and the market access flow through whatever contract between generations exists at the moment of entry. If the contract is sound, accession compounds it. If the generational balance is tilted, accession finances the tilt. The moment before entry is when the terms are cheapest to rewrite.

Accession magnifies rather than substitutes domestic policy. European membership provides larger markets, greater mobility and greater financial resources, but it does not redesign the contract between generations. It operates through the institutions, incentives and public choices already in place. The years immediately before accession are more than years of compliance. They are the period during which the quality of the contract itself can still be improved before European integration begins to compound its effects.

VII. The chairs at the table

The concept has occupants as well as content. Every institution relevant to Albania’s next decade of European integration already holds commitments that the intergenerational fairness frame connects.

The European Commission holds the strategy itself, the index, the 2028 report and the enlargement reports that already measure Albanian education spending against the EU average.[39] The Albanian state holds the census that documents the condition of the contract, the budget in which the generational balance is written each year, and the national strategies whose targets, from education financing to demographic revitalisation, are by definition commitments to future residents. The World Bank holds a Country Partnership Framework with human capital as a pillar, together with a Public Finance Review whose two sector chapters, pensions and early childhood, are the two ends of the generational ledger.[40] In Albania the index did not travel on its own. UNICEF carried it into national positioning through the human capital development work it has led from its deep dive into the subject to the joint opinion signed with the European Union Delegation and the World Bank in October 2025, which reads the country’s demographic and educational record through the index.[41] The United Nations system holds the Pact for the Future and the Declaration on Future Generations, and in Albania a cooperation framework whose priorities begin with investment in people.[42] The OECD holds PISA, the instrument through which learning outcomes enter the record.[43]

The table has one property that the list of its occupants does not show. Every party to the contract sits at it with institutional defence except one. Working adults are represented through the wage bargain and the organisations built around it. Older cohorts are defended by pension institutions, by organised constituencies, and by an electoral weight that every census enlarges. Children hold no vote, no union and no ministry of their own, and residents not yet born hold nothing at all. A fairness framework that designates no advocate for the junior party is captured by the senior one from the first day, not through ill intent but through the ordinary arithmetic of representation. Whichever institution occupies that chair holds the part of the contract on which every other part depends.

No actor at this table needs persuading into the frame; each is already inside it by its own mandate. What intergenerational fairness adds, building on the ground the human capital development work has already prepared, is the connection: a single lens under which the commitments of these institutions, now dispersed across strategies, indices and reports, become one measurable question about the contract between generations.

VIII. Preparing for the European intergenerational agenda

The significance of the European Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness lies less in the principles it articulates than in the direction it sets, and the direction is already written into instruments with dates.[44] The question for Albania is no longer whether the concept is relevant, but whether the country prepares before the requirement arrives.

The practical value of adopting the framework extends beyond better policymaking. European strategies of this kind do not remain declarations; they become programming priorities, and assessment criteria. That has been the career of the Youth Guarantee and of the Child Guarantee, each of which began as a principle and now operates through national plans and monitored commitments. Nothing in the design of this strategy points to a different path. Resources do not follow a concept automatically; they follow the countries able to demonstrate a coherent national approach when the instruments arrive. For Albania, adopting the framework early is not only a matter of fairness between generations. It is also a matter of strategic readiness for European integration.

Preparing for that future does not require creating yet another strategy. It requires governing differently. The country already possesses many of the building blocks: demographic analysis, human capital development, education reform, municipal transformation, public finance reform, territorial development and the accession agenda. The opportunity is to organise them around a common framework that asks one question consistently: does this decision strengthen or weaken the contract between generations?

The shift begins with measurement, and it can begin before the European index arrives. National Transfer Accounts, built on existing statistical and administrative data, would transform the budget into an annual generational balance sheet.[45] An intergenerational fairness dashboard would bring demographic, educational, fiscal and territorial indicators into a single picture of the country’s long-term trajectory. Fairness assessments, progressively incorporated into legislation, strategies and major public investments, would complement fiscal and regulatory analysis by asking how today’s decisions reshape tomorrow’s inheritance.

Read through the contract between generations, policies that today appear separate, from early childhood development and education to pensions, labour markets, municipal capacity, demographic revitalisation and territorial cohesion, become different expressions of the same national objective: preserving and strengthening the country’s capacity to transfer opportunity from one generation to the next.

The emergence of intergenerational fairness also asks a question of development partners. If governments are to organise policy around the contract between generations, the organisations that support them must organise their support the same way: beyond sectoral interventions, towards helping governments connect investments in children, education, health, labour markets, territory and public finance into one framework that can be measured and improved.

In Albania much of the ground for that role is already prepared. The human capital development work UNICEF has steered over the past eighteen months established the case for investing in people and carried it across sectors rather than within one; the joint opinion of October 2025 showed the country’s international partners already reading Albania’s record through a single lens. Intergenerational fairness continues that line of work, providing the framework through which those investments can be connected across institutions, prioritised across the life course and assessed against a common objective. The practical expressions of the role are concrete: national generational accounts developed with INSTAT, the European strategy translated into an Albanian implementation framework, fairness woven into national planning, and the institutions that each hold one part of the agenda[46] convened around a common table. The next step is to carry the advocacy for investing in people forward into construction: helping government build the architecture through which the contract between generations is understood, measured and strengthened.

Two centuries later, the European Union has begun translating Burke’s partnership of the living, the dead and the unborn into public policy. Albania now has a rare opening among accession countries: to do more than import a mature European framework; it can help shape how that framework takes root at national level while both its institutions and the European agenda are still evolving. The intergenerational contract asks more than whether today’s decisions are fair. It asks whether institutions are designed with tomorrow’s citizens in mind. Europe has chosen its future. Albania’s opportunity to organise its institutions around that future it seeks to join, before that future becomes an external expectation. Making future generations part of Albania’s institutional DNA would not be an act of compliance with Europe, but an act of preparation for it.

***

[1]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, Communication COM(2026) 110 final, Brussels, 4 March 2026; announced by press release IP/26/535 of the same date. The Communication is the first EU-level strategy devoted to fairness between generations, adopted under the first Commission mandate to include a Commissioner responsible for intergenerational fairness.

[2]European Commission, Making sure no generation gets left behind, news item, Directorate-General for Communication, Brussels, 5 March 2026. The strategy presents a new intergenerational ‘contract’ as its organising framework, in section 4 of COM(2026) 110 final, and states the commitment in the terms used here: decisions taken now must ensure a fair balance of benefits and burdens across current and future generations.

[3]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final, section 4. The Communication defines the three dimensions as fair policymaking, embedding long-term thinking and the youth perspective (section 4.1); fair opportunities, uniting generations around shared goals for a better future (section 4.2); and fair places, ensuring intergenerational fairness across territories (section 4.3).

[4]European Commission, COM(2026) 110 final; press release IP/26/535, 4 March 2026. Each commitment appears in the strategy’s action lists: the Intergenerational Fairness Index and the Demography Forum under fair opportunities (section 4.2), the Future Oriented Policymaking package under fair policymaking (section 4.1), and the progress report, due in early 2028 and intended to inform EU contributions to United Nations follow-up on the Declaration on Future Generations (section 4.1).

[5]Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790).

[6]John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), section 44, on the just savings principle.

[7]James J. Heckman, “Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children”, Science, vol. 312, no. 5782 (2006), pp. 1900–1902.

[8]Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason (eds.), Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011). Chapter 1 defines the generational economy as the institutions and mechanisms through which each generation or age group produces, consumes, shares and saves resources, together with the economic flows across age groups that result (p. 7). The volume published the first comparative set of these accounts, covering 23 economies.

[9]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final, section 2. The Communication treats children and young people, working-age adults and older people in turn, and extends the frame to future generations through a life-course perspective. The factsheet accompanying the strategy summarises the scope as benefits and responsibilities shared fairly across all ages.

[10]World Bank, The Human Capital Index 2020 Update: Human Capital in the Time of COVID-19 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020).

[11]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final. The Communication cites the strengthened European Child Guarantee, the European Care Strategy and the Union of Skills, adopted in 2025, among the instruments on which it builds (section 5), supports the implementation of the Child and Youth Guarantees through the European Social Fund Plus, and announces the Longevity Roadmap as a flagship action under fair policymaking (section 4.1).

[12]European Commission, Breaking the Cycle of Child Poverty – Strengthening the European Child Guarantee, COM(2026) 539 final, Brussels, 6 May 2026. The Communication announces a Commission Toolkit to help Member States link the two guarantees through integrated pathways for children and young people in need, supporting the transition into education, training or employment.

[13]INSTAT, Albanian Population and Housing Census 2023: Main Results (Tirana: Institute of Statistics, 2024). The census recorded 2,402,113 usual residents on 18 September 2023, a decrease of about 420,000 from the 2011 census.

[14]INSTAT, The Population of Albania, census-based analysis (Tirana: Institute of Statistics, 2024). The average age rose from 35.3 years in 2011 to 42.5 years in 2023; residents aged 65 and over rose from about 11 per cent to about 20 per cent of the population.

[15]INSTAT, vital statistics; see also Delegation of the European Union, United Nations and World Bank in Albania, Albania’s Human Capital Investment: A Strategic Partnership for EU Integration and Sustainable Development, joint opinion, Tirana, October 2025, which cites a total fertility rate of 1.21 children per woman.

[16]INSTAT census results: a natural increase of roughly 88,000 between 2011 and 2023 against a recorded decline of about 420,000 implies net departures of approximately half a million people over the period.

[17]Lee and Mason, Population Aging and the Generational Economy, op. cit., chapter 1 and, on public transfers, chapter 7, Tim Miller, “The rise of the intergenerational state: aging and development”. In the accounts, taxes are assigned to the age of the payer and benefits to the age of the beneficiary, so that net public transfers by age show which groups a fiscal system finances and which finance it. The same treatment is codified in United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, National Transfer Accounts Manual: Measuring and Analysing the Generational Economy (New York: United Nations, 2013), chapter 6, which defines public reallocations as flows of current resources across ages mediated by the government.

[18]European Commission, Albania 2025 Report, SWD(2025) 750 final, Brussels, 4 November 2025: “The estimated public spending on education in 2024 represented 2.6% of GDP compared with 2.1% in 2023, remaining under the EU average of 4.6%.”

[19]World Bank, Albania Public Finance Review: Enhancing Fiscal Sustainability (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025), chapter on early childhood education and care.

[20]World Bank, Human Capital Index 2020 Update, Albania country brief. Albania’s score rose from 0.54 in 2010 to 0.63 in 2020.

[21]World Bank Group, Insights from Disaggregating the Human Capital Index (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020); Ritika D’Souza, Roberta Gatti and Aart Kraay, “A Socioeconomic Disaggregation of the World Bank Human Capital Index”, Policy Research Working Paper 9020 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2019).

[22]OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Country Note: Albania (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2023); OECD, PISA 2022: Insights and Interpretations (Paris: OECD, 2023), which records Albania at 368 points in mathematics, 69 points below 2018.

[23]World Bank, Albania Public Finance Review (2025), chapter on pensions.

[24]IMF, Albania: 2024 Article IV Consultation, IMF Country Report No. 25/20 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, January 2025); IMF, Albania: 2025 Article IV Consultation, IMF Country Report No. 25/345 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2025).

[25]Lee and Mason, Population Aging and the Generational Economy, op. cit.; National Transfer Accounts project, www.ntaccounts.org. The project reports research teams in more than sixty countries constructing accounts that measure how people at each age produce, consume, share and save resources. The accounts are designed to complement the United Nations System of National Accounts, which is what makes the framework consistent across countries.

[26] National Transfer Accounts project, NTA Countries, www.ntaccounts.org/web/nta/show/NTA%20Countries. The network’s European members include Serbia, Moldova, Turkey and Kosovo; estimates for the remaining EU member states were constructed by the AGENTA project.

[27]United Nations, National Transfer Accounts Manual, op. cit., chapters 3 and 4. The manual specifies construction from data most states already hold: age profiles estimated from household income and expenditure surveys and administrative records, scaled to aggregate totals taken from the System of National Accounts. No new statistical infrastructure is required; the feasibility claim made here for Albania rests on that design.

[28]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final, section 4.3. The Commission’s launch presentation renders the third pillar as fair places “so that the region you are born in doesn’t define your future”. Section 4.3 grounds the pillar in access: where people live shapes their access to education, jobs, housing, services and participation, and territorial disparities can amplify inequalities over time.

[29]INSTAT, Albanian Population and Housing Census 2023: the share of the resident population in the prefecture of Tirana rose from 26.8 per cent in 2011 to 31.6 per cent in 2023.

[30]INSTAT, census-based dependency analysis: Kukës records the highest youth dependency ratio (31.8 per cent) and the lowest old-age dependency ratio (19.9 per cent); Gjirokastër records the lowest youth dependency ratio (19.0 per cent) and the highest old-age dependency ratio (46.1 per cent).

[31]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final, section 4.3. The Communication commits to targeted, place-based actions conducted in conjunction with local and regional authorities, beginning with the Voices of the Future initiative in partnership with the European Committee of the Regions. The presumption of local institutional capacity is built into the pillar’s delivery model, not added by this paper.

[32]European Commission, Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, COM(2026) 110 final, section 5. The Communication names enlargement as one of the EU’s most consequential long-term investments, describes it as an intergenerational commitment as much as a geopolitical one, and states that candidate and potential candidate countries will be invited to participate in the strategy’s actions alongside member states wherever possible and feasible.

[33]European Commission, The European Union’s Anti-Poverty Strategy, COM(2026) 538, Brussels, 6 May 2026; European Commission, Communication on breaking the cycle of child poverty and strengthening the European Child Guarantee, with accompanying Staff Working Document SWD(2026) 772, Brussels, 6 May 2026. The founding instrument is Council Recommendation (EU) 2021/1004 of 14 June 2021 establishing a European Child Guarantee.

[34]Council Recommendation of 30 October 2020 on A Bridge to Jobs – Reinforcing the Youth Guarantee (2020/C 372/01).

[35]European Commission, Union of Skills (2025); the European Care Deal is announced for 2027 in the EU Anti-Poverty Strategy, as the successor to the 2022 European Care Strategy.

[36]United Nations General Assembly, The Pact for the Future, with the Declaration on Future Generations annexed, resolution A/RES/79/1, New York, September 2024.

[37]Competence Centre Youth-Check (KomJC), German Research Institute for Public Administration: since 2017, federal draft legislation is assessed for its effects on people aged 12 to 27, with findings published in the legislative record.

[38]KomJC, Regulatory Impact Assessment for the Young Generation: The Youth-Check (Speyer, 2021). In OECD comparison, only Austria, France, Germany and New Zealand report an ex-ante regulatory impact assessment for the young generation.

[39]European Commission, Albania 2025 Report, SWD(2025) 750 final, op. cit.

[40]World Bank Group, Country Partnership Framework for Albania FY23–FY27; Human Capital Index 2020 Update; Albania Public Finance Review (2025), op. cit.

[41]Delegation of the European Union, United Nations and World Bank in Albania, Albania’s Human Capital Investment: A Strategic Partnership for EU Integration and Sustainable Development, joint opinion, Tirana, October 2025.

[42]United Nations, Pact for the Future, op. cit.; Government of Albania and United Nations, Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework 2022–2026.

[43]OECD, PISA 2022 Results, op. cit.

[44] The calendar is explicit. The Intergenerational Fairness Index and the Demography Forum were announced in COM(2026) 110 final of 4 March 2026; the EU Anti-Poverty Strategy of 6 May 2026 sets 2050 as the horizon for eradicating poverty in the Union; the Commission Toolkit linking the Child Guarantee and the Youth Guarantee, announced in COM(2026) 539 final, is expected in 2027; the European Care Deal is announced for 2027; the 2027 Ageing Report will carry projections to 2080; and the strategy’s progress report is due in early 2028. A country preparing in 2026 meets each of these dates ready

[45]United Nations, National Transfer Accounts Manual, op. cit. Chapters 3 and 4 set out the construction sequence from national accounts aggregates and household survey microdata to age profiles by single year of age; the balance-sheet reading of the budget follows directly from the accounts’ treatment of public flows by age.

[46] The chairs are identifiable by the part of the agenda each holds. INSTAT holds the measurement; the Ministry of Finance holds the budget through which the generational balance is set each year; the Ministry of Education and Sports and the Ministry of Health and Social Protection hold the formation and protection of capability; the Ministry of Economy and Innovation holds employment, skills and the economic chapters of accession; the State Agency for Strategic Planning and Aid Coordination holds the national planning framework into which the concept would be mainstreamed; and the municipalities hold the services through which the contract is honoured or broken locally. No institution owns the whole; that is the reason the table is needed.