Being a country in transition, Albania has sustained vast political and socio-economic changes over the past 15 years, mostly due to its engagement in democratisation and transformation to an open market economy. The pathway to transition has involved economic hardship and political unrest and has been accompanied by intense, large-scale, geographical mobility. This paper describes population change due to internal and international migration, 1989–2001, using Census data at district level. Its contribution is a technical one in applying a method that allows new estimates to be made of the scale of internal migration in Albania.

Descriptive analysis of population changes in 36 Albanian districts, based on the last two censuses, lead to the identification of poles of attraction of internal migrants. Limited data concerning the 1989 Census and the 12 years between the censuses resulted in the creation of various indices that characterise internal migration, such as the Attraction and Expulsion Index stemming from the Origin–Destination Matrix of the districts. In addition an Index of Conservation of the population and an Index of External Migration were also derived at the district level. By considering internal and international migration as two separate phenomena, we emphasise their uniqueness in affecting population change in Albania. The District of Tirana, capital of Albania, absorbed the majority of the inflow of internal migrants. The latter part of the paper focuses on the population of Tirana as the county's major migration destination. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.