Albania aspires to join the European Union and it holds the candidate status. In this process, the EU supports financially the reforms to introduce the necessary political, economic and institutional reforms to bring them in line with EU standards. Since 1991 EU has given considerable amount of financial assistance to Albania.  The purpose of this article is to make a literature review of the content of EU funds in supporting candidate and potential candidate countries and to define the absorption capacity and its aspects.

JEL Classification: G01; G21; C23.

Keywords: EU funds; Absorption Capacity; Albania.