It remains to be seen if they can run the country any better.. In his cell in Beersheba in southern Israel, Yigal Amir must be feeling satisfied. He knows that he has succeeded in his aim of stopping the Oslo peace process by assassinating Yitzhak Rabin six months ago. President Berisha's government gave every Albanian citizen a voucher worth $1,000 which was theoretically to be used to buy shares in public companies as they came on to the market.

But in practice the vouchers have been traded for cash at a heavy discount, and then scooped up en masse by individuals awarded company franchises by the government.Individuals lucky enough to win a franchise (and the opposition charges that they are all good friends of the ruling party) have thus been able to buy a company for a fraction of its true value - the vouchers are trading at $120-$130 on the open market.The prevailing mood in Albania is one of anger towards the ruling party for appearing to look after its own interests while failing to guarantee such basic services as water and electricity, even in Tirana, despite four years in power and $2.7bn received in foreign aid. "Thirty years ago the average CEO [chief executive officer] made about 35 or 40 times what the average worker did," Bill Clinton said last week. "Today that's up to 200 times, and it was only 120 times when I took office." It is a sign of America's mood that Mr Clinton, facing re-election this year, should want to embarrass a sector of the population traditionally admired for achieving the American Dream. Unlike the British, Americans have tended to believe that in the land of opportunity those who made it deserved it. Today that is changing. The US economy is stronger on paper than it has ever been, yet most people are working longer hours than ever and struggling to make ends meet. The pie is growing bigger, but the slices are not distributed fairly.

Since 1974 the average chief executive's real income has risen by 300 per cent, the average worker's has fallen by 13 per cent.The moral contract that once existed between employer and employee is perceived to have broken down. One European ambassador politely calls the situation "laissez-faire gone mad".The country's privatisation scheme is a case in point. The Democratic Party claims to be poor, but its members don't seem to be having any financial trouble hosting fashion shows and hotel receptions as part of their election campaign.Want to know why petrol-smuggling to Serbia and Montenegro went on in violation of the UN embargo last year? Maybe it is not entirely coincidental that the company then enjoying a monopoly on petrol distribution in Albania, Shqiponja, was run by Party chairman, Tritan Shehu.Want to know why Albanian police have made plenty of marijuana seizures, but failed to net any significant quantities of the cocaine and heroin that is known to flood through the country en route from Turkey to western Europe? According to one Western intelligence expert, it is because the traffic in hard drugs is being organised with the help of a figure within the inner circle of the Albanian government.Many Albanians do not believe they are living in a free-market society at all, but one carefully regulated and groomed by the government for the short-term advantage of its members and its chosen clients. The chief of the ruling Democratic Party in Tirana, Albert Brojke, came out with a rather unconvincing lament about the difficulties of living on his deputy's salary of $300 a month "It's very tough being in power. I have to work morning, noon and night for a fraction of what I could earn in the private sector," he said.And yet all over town you see tell-tale yellow number plates (assigned to the vehicles of government or state officials) attached to brand-new Mercedes, BMWs and Toyota four-wheel drives. "Three-quarters of them are illegal," said my guide, "but you can be sure someone in authority is collecting handsomely on every one of them."Officially corruption does not exist in Albania, but in a country where the average state wage fails to cover the basic living costs of a small family, it is inevitable.

Drive around with a wing-mirror missing and the police will inevitably stop you - not because they really think a wing-mirror is going to make you safer on the dilapidated roads, but because they need to pocket the fines they invariably impose to bump up their salaries.Those are the rules of the game right up the social scale. On a smaller scale, the streets, pavements and parks of central Tirana are dotted with thousands of new bars, restaurants and small shops that have sprouted without any semblance of urban planning. The land beneath the judge's villa would be worth between $200 and $300 a square metre on the open market, but as state property would have been sold for no more than $16 a square metre.There are property scams going on all over town. President Sali Berisha's own father-in-law mysteriously acquired a plum site for a symbolic sum last year, but had to halt his building project when the affair blew up into a major public scandal.