Education in Albania was modernized and took the example of Western countries, applying Western texts because, during the Communist period, many fields of study were forbidden because they had a Western approach. This study aims to highlight the application of interactive teaching methods and the impact these methods have on increasing interest in the field of study. This was done through the questionnaire developed among 110 students of the Marketing Scientific Master Faculty of Economics at the University of Tirana. Of these, 60 students belong to the academic year 2018-2019 and 50 to the academic year 2019-2020. The analysis of the study is based on correlation, significance analysis, reliability analysis, regression, Anova test, and Mann-Whitney test. The study has resulted that women are the ones who prefer this study cycle the most; the average of the students who follow this study cycle is about segment 7.1-8. Finding yourself in a subject affects the willingness to attend an hour of lecture, and information about interactive teaching methods affects the willingness to attend an hour of class. Between students of two academic years, study hours are the same during the week.

This paper examines the relationship between financial development and economic growth for the six countries of the Western Balkan (Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia) for the period 2005–2019. To determine the direction of the causality between economic growth and financial development, we employed the vector autoregression VAR approach. Findings indicate evidence for the supply leading theory (Hurlin & Venet, 2008; McKinnon, 1973; Patrick, 1966; Shaw, 1973): financial development causes economic growth overall, especially when private credit was used as the proxy for it. Yet, we observed bi-directional links when financial development was proxied by broad money. Furthermore, interest spread affected economic growth. The findings also indicate a positive relationship between broad money and private credit taken together to GDP growth, but only in the first lag; in the second lag, the inverse effect of broad money and private credit on GDP growth became evident. On a comparative scale, private credit was found to have a bigger impact on GDP than broad money. We also observe that the banking system intermediaries have a significant role in spurring economic growth in the region.

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This study investigates financial development's effect on Albania's shadow economy from 1995 to 2015. We use data on the shadow economy from Medina and Schneider (2018) and other economic variables to examine the relationship between the shadow economy and economic growth. We use ADF, PP, and KPSS tests to determine the stationarity of the data series and Toda Yamamoto Granger Causality and VAR(p+dmax) estimation to identify the direction of the causal relationship between financial development and other economic variables and the shadow economy in Albania. Our results indicate a unidirectional causal relationship between financial development and the shadow economy, as well as between trade openness and the shadow economy. These findings suggest that efforts to improve and deepen financial development and trade openness could help formalize Albania's economy. Based on these results, we recommend that the Albanian government focus on financial inclusion reforms and facilitating exports and imports to combat the shadow economy and bring these activities into the formal sector.   Received: 21 February 2023 / Accepted: 20 April 2023 / Published: 5 May 2023