Foreign currency lending in Albania

The growth of lending in foreign currency in many Central, Eastern and South Eastern European (CESEE) countries has driven to the expansion of analyses and researches in this regard. In Albania, similar to the other regional countries, the study of main determinants of foreign currency-lending is rather important. FCL accounts for 65% of lending to private sector. This paper examines the determinants of FCL to the private sector by means of the bound test approach to Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach, based on demand and supply indicators. The results provide evidence that foreign currency lending is mainly driven by the availability of bank foreign funding deposits and minimum variance portfolio share. Foreign currency lending is more preferred under higher interest rate differentials, inflation volatility and lower exchange rate volatility. The study identifies a long-run cointegrated and stable relationship