The Law on Strategic Investments or the anatomy of a planned failure

Ten years after the entry into force of the Law on Strategic Investments, Albania faces not just a reflection, but a grim mirror that can no longer be avoided.

Albania confronts a bitter balance sheet and a fundamental question:

Has this law served the interest of national development or narrow clientelist interests?

The answer, in light of the data, is shocking.

This law has not been a driver of economic development but a perfect instrument for market distortion, political favoritism, and selective redistribution of public wealth.

When adopted in 2015, the law was presented as a transitional tool to attract large capital into strategic sectors such as energy, agriculture, industry, and infrastructure.

Thus, this law, conceived as an instrument to boost sustainable economic development, has deeply deviated from its declared objectives. What began as an effort to attract foreign capital and transform productive sectors has turned into an institutionalized scheme for clientelist favoritism, concentration of investments in sectors with quick financial returns, and exemption from equal rules of the game.

The law, initially introduced as a temporary solution, has been extended five times repeatedly, becoming a continuous channel for selective facilitation of construction interests, mainly in coastal tourism.

The result is telling.

Of all approved investments, only two are foreign, only one in agriculture, while over 80% of projects relate to real estate (apartments, hotels, and resorts). This simple fact speaks louder than any analysis.

There has been no attempt to fulfill the initial goals, only efforts to use the law’s provisions for other purposes.

Most worrying is that this deviation is not accidental.

The law has undergone an internal conceptual unraveling, where the definition of “strategic investment” has been expanded and banalized to the extent that a seaside apartment complex is considered strategic for national development.

Instead of attracting international capital, the law has supported domestic actors who have benefited from extraordinary privileges to bypass legal procedures, build in protected or disputed property areas, and access public land without real competition.

A detailed analysis of the period 2021–2024 shows that this law has not effectively influenced economic growth through productive sectors. Supposed investments in energy, transport, or agriculture have either not materialized or remained on paper.

Meanwhile, the growth of the tourism sector has produced concentrated, often informal construction, without integration into the local economy, without supply chains from agriculture or domestic industry, and above all, without creating sustainable formalization in the economy.

The problems are not only economic results but also in the quality of the process.

This is precisely the most sophisticated form of legal abuse: when development rhetoric obscures private gains and exemption from legal standards.

Furthermore, the law has failed to attract serious international capital.

This has not happened by chance.

Legal uncertainty, politicized procedures, perceived corruption, and lack of capital verification have created a climate of distrust.

Instead of making Albania competitive for long-cycle investments with added value and embedded technology, it has become an environment where serious investors avoid engagement and leave the field to those seeking quick profits from construction and requalification of public land.

To be honest, the problem is not only in the law’s application but in the very political architecture that has accompanied it.

Local favoritism, ties to local and central power, absence of cross-sector strategies, and administrative incapacity to handle applications in complex sectors have created an environment where the law has served more as a “distribution tool for friends” than as a national development policy.

In some cases, serious conflicts with local communities have arisen, and tensions over property issues have deepened, showing that the law has not been applied even as a mechanism of economic justice but as a channel to accelerate contested decisions.

Against this backdrop, it is not only necessary but urgent that the Law on Strategic Investments be archived, not as a punishment but as a political lesson for the entire system. Albania, in the new conditions of 2025 and facing the EU’s Growth Plan for the Western Balkans, can no longer proceed with the logic of selective privileges and construction clientelism.

The country needs a new investment framework, built on clear criteria, equal standards for all, full transparency, control over the origin of capital, and above all, a strategy that directs investments towards sectors that create sustainable production and horizontal and vertical economic linkages across the territory.

Otherwise, Albania will continue to build resorts that do not fill hotels, apartments that remain empty, and produce only one type of growth the growth of real estate in the hands of a few politically connected, without increasing added value for society.

But this is not development. It is an economic standstill with a developmental facade.

The time for real reforms has come. Albania needs a new legal framework for investments that is equal, open, integrated, and controllable. A system that supports projects bringing technology, employment, exports, and regional development—not real estate wealth for a politically connected minority.

If this does not happen, the country will continue to walk the gap between development rhetoric and exploitation reality. This analysis is a call for a thorough and honest review of investment policies in Albania, not to punish the past but to avoid losing the future.