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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in framework of financing the city’s capital investments through loans aims to strengthen the city’s financial management system and to enhance its creditworthiness. On this purpose, EBRD has launched the Tirana Creditworthiness Enhancement Programme (CEP) selecting the SGI Studio Galli Ingegneria SpA (SGI) and its associates SST Consult, the Urban Research Institute (URI), and the Social Sustainable Economic Development Agency (SEDA) as the Consultant to provide the City of Tirana with technical assistance in the area of financial management. The goal of the Tirana Creditworthiness Enhancement Program is to generate a sufficient budget surplus, have sufficient money to make debt repayments and service the loan (including interest), and stabilize and maintain this situation for the loan repayment period. The approach to reach the goal assumes that the strengthening of creditworthiness will be achieved through improved financial management after introducing the best international municipal finance management practices. The Tirana Creditworthiness Enhancement Programme is in line with the fiscal decentralization framework of Albanian government. The government has drafted of new law on local government borrowing that is expected to be adopted by the Parliament. In this regard, CEP is seen by the City of Tirana not only as a program of technical assistance in servicing the loan, but furthermore as a program of strengthening the financial management capacity of the City of Tirana before entering into the internal and external financial markets. The new instrument of financing the city’s capital investments using loans will allow the city to accelerate its infrastructure investments and development. It will result in significant increase of infrastructure service quality thus improving living standards of citizens.
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