How much did Kosovo cost the exiles' absence this year?

The GAP Institute brought an analysis of it based on data from Pristina International Airport “Adem Jashari” and the Kosovar Insurance Bureau for the January-August 2020 period. According to this, analysis for the same period, the number of foreign visitors to Kosovo was about 62.5% lower than in 2019.

Policy analyst at the GAP Institute, Berat Thaci, in an interview for KosovaPress, has said it translates into about two million visits from abroad, Albinfo.ch explains.

“Based on the figures we collected from Kosovo International Airport and the Insurance Bureau, it means that according to the figures for travel by air or plane and land that are cars and other vehicles, compared to last year for January-August 2020, we have a drop in visits by 60 percent from abroad. If we translate this into numbers, only at Pristina Airport, we only have one million fewer visits. If we look at it as a total of nearly two million visits are thought to have been realised less at the level of”, Thaci has said.

Thaci has said that as a result of the decline in visits by the diaspora there have also been major declines in Kosovo's economy, while adding that the damage caused in the country's economy revenues is about 300m euros.

The “on the basis of a calculations we've made at the GAP Institute, that only by the decline of visits, incomes in the country's economy have dropped to 300 million euros, and this naturally has negative effects, especially for some sectors that are more directly related to diaspora visits, but also for the overall economy. If we talk about specific sectors, we know that gastronomy, hotels are the sectors that are directly influenced by the diaspora's lack of visits, but other sectors such as transport, that part of the diaspora comes with their cars and they then spend in Kosovo in Dervate”, he says.

Christmas and New Year are the period when Albanians living abroad choose to return to their homeland to spend the holidays, but this is not expected the same end of the year.

Thaci says the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures that other countries where our diaspora is mainly oriented will be a major obstacle for fellow countrymen to return to their homeland.

We have two phenomena, the first is that the virus is spreading significantly, whether in Kosovo or Europe, and therefore that could be a factor that could deter them from their visits, because it's an increasing trend of spread of the virus, but on the other hand. Kosovo has slightly relaxed entry policies, compared with the period of the beginning of the year, when it has been banned from entry of foreign citizens, now on the PCR test they can enter Kosovo, but given the spread of the virus we think this will be an obstacle to”, Thaci has said.