Modeling and Forecasting of Food Imports in Albania

International trade plays a very important role in the development of all economies, including Albania. The aim of this study is to model and to forecast the value of food imports in Albania using time series models. The main purpose of this study is to find the most appropriate model for forecasting the value of food imports. The monthly data of food imports are taken from the Albanian Institute of Statistics and are covering the period of time January 2005 – October 2016. The two methods used in this research are Holt-Winters Method with trend and seasonality, and seasonal ARIMA model. The forecasting accuracy measures indicated that the forecasts obtained from Holt-Winters were more accurate than the forecasts of the best fitted seasonal ARIMA. These findings are useful for customers, producers, wholesalers, retailers and policymakers.