With the end of Communist residency limitations, Albanians flooded into urban centers.

Tirana’s population quadrupled in ten years. The attending construction boom has been the
main growth sector in Albania’s economy since the collapse of the pyramid schemes. Much
of this construction is financed through klering contracts, in which a developer pays for land,
materials, and labor with the promise of a given number of apartments in the future building.
It functions as a form of speculative finance whereby developers shift risk downward onto
subcontractors, and subcontractors onto workers. If the building isn’t completed (a common
occurrence) or the apartments fail to sell at their predicted value, a chain of debt is activated
that often leaves the suppliers and workers bankrupt. Even in the best of cases, contractors
generally can’t pay for labor until the allotment of apartments has been sold, so construction
workers may go without pay for months or even years.

One reason Albanian developers rely so heavily on klering is because it’s hard to keep
enough cash on hand, given all the bribes necessary to secure permits or public construction
tenders. As with the pyramid schemes, the political elite are the ultimate beneficiaries of the
pyramidification of the construction industry. In Modern Albania, Abrahams shows how the
meteoric ascent of the two most powerful politicians in the country today, Prime Minister Edi
Rama and recently impeached President Ilir Meta, was enabled by their control over the
construction industry. As mayor of Tirana in the early 2000s, Rama gained the nickname
“Mr. Ten Percent,” a reference to alleged kickbacks for construction permits. Meta—who
was described in leaked American diplomatic cables as “spectacularly corrupt” and whose
aide was extradited to the United States on murder, arson, and drug smuggling charges—was
known to control public construction tenders in the early 2000s and briefly stepped down
from government in 2011 after being recorded discussing a €700,000 bribe related to the
building of a hydroelectric dam. “The pyramid way,” as Musaraj’s interviewees refer to it, is
alive and well in Albania’s construction industry, to the benefit of many of the same
politicians who oversaw the pyramid schemes of the 1990s.