Nobel Laureate George Stigler was an insightful sociologist of the economics profession. From his “The Politics of Political Economists” to his analysis of “the economics industry,” as “producers of economists and economic research,” Stigler knew that the practice of economics yields insights into the economics produced. For more than fifty years, ideology drove economics practice in Albania. Beginning in 1991, economists and educators faced a daunting task, to remake not only the Albanian economy but also the economics profession. This paper examines the socio-economic evolution of the economics industry in Albania from 1978 to 2008. Methodology: I use bibliometric techniques to construct a data-driven picture of the economics profession in Albania. Data includes the professional publications on Albania and by Albanian economists, the dissertations produced at the University of Tirana, and textbook use. I show how the economics profession in Albania has become increasingly professionalized and globalized along Western, though not American, lines. A survey of publishing practices in both international and Albanian journals illustrates how the history of isolation and Hoxha-dominated political economy undermined perceptions about the usefulness and necessity of citations. Albanian economics remains disconnected from the mid-century economic theory and the critical and formative papers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Though there is some evidence that economics practice has become increasingly separated from economic theory generally (Biddle and Hamermesh 2016), in Albania they were never associated. This has continuing implications for the quality of work that can be produced.