Living in Albania

Albania is where the balance tips the other way, since pay sits mid-range while the cost of an ordinary life runs higher than that, so a salary tends to go on the basics with little held back. The economy leans on its coastline, and hospitality and tourism is where the doors open widest for someone arriving without local ties. Beyond that, hiring stays close to who you know, and English reaches mainly into the parts of the economy built around visitors. It is a place chosen more for the life it offers than for the money left at the end of the month.

Albania's defining migration pattern is the people who have left. About 1.2M Albanians live abroad, and the diaspora has grown 23% over the past decade. It is overwhelmingly an Italian and Greek story: 542.6K live in Italy and 474.4K in neighboring Greece, the two destinations together accounting for the bulk of Albanians overseas. Inside the country, the foreign-born population is small — about 41,000, or 2% of residents.