Report / Talents are not rewarded in public administration, employment is not based on merit

2026-03-10 07:32:00, Aktualitet CNA

Report / Talents are not rewarded in public administration, employment is not

The World Bank has listed Albania among the countries that do not apply unified standards for recruiting talent in the public sector.

The recently published Global Development Report 2025 highlights that Albania faces an unequal distribution of employment practices, where a candidate's fate to become part of the public service depends more on the institution to which they apply than on a unified national regulator.

At the national level, the average of Albanian civil servants recruited through written meritocracy stands somewhere around 50%. While in some Albanian institutions the written recruitment process is almost negligible (around 20%), in other organizations within the same country this practice reaches over 70%.

This difference, according to the World Bank, shows that the employment process in the Albanian public administration depends more on the internal policies of the institutions than on a consolidated national standard.

From a governance perspective, this fragmentation carries significant risks, the Bank analyzes. According to it, governments should prioritize the implementation of standards that work to recruit talent into the administration, and not just follow procedures superficially.

In the case of Albania, the argument leans towards the need for a harmonization of procedures. If an institution manages to identify talent through precise competitive methods and procedures, this standard is not applied across all public entities.

Studies cited in the report show that an institution’s performance increases with the addition of rules up to a certain point, but beyond that, each new rule becomes stifling. In Albania, where the recruitment graph shows a fluctuation from 20% to over 70% of the use of written exams, it seems that institutions suffer from two extremes, either a total lack of standard criteria, or procedures so complex that they paralyze the recruitment of new talent.

Beyond the notion that tight control prevents abuse, the report provides evidence that giving employees autonomy can increase efficiency. In cases like those in Pakistan and Ghana, increasing discretion (freedom to judge) for complex tasks reduced delays and even lowered procurement costs by 9%.

For Albania, this is a strong argument; instead of investing solely in bureaucratic controls that are often avoided, the focus should shift to strengthening the professional judgment of the civil servant.

When a public employee in Albania is forced to blindly follow rules drafted by someone unfamiliar with the work on the ground, his motivation drops and his agency to solve problems is lost.

The report notes that standards are not “good in themselves” if they do not bring impact. Albania could follow the model of Vietnam, which did not attempt to implement thousands of pages of international accounting standards (IPSAS) immediately, but divided them into gradual modules over several years./ Monitor