Beyond partisanship
On a wider issue, we cannot have improved our productivity if we consider the amount of people that have been taken on by the government both before and after the general election.
Now that the big leaders have spoken and given us their take on the Budget, it is time to analyse what the Budget means with regards to Malta’s economic situation.
For there are issues that simply do not feature in the Budget measures but are very important for our economic well-being. The problem is they have not been mentioned in the leaders’ speeches and consequently the public, and the commentators, did not think to deal with these issues.
First in this motley jumble of issues is productivity. We carry in this issue the results of the Ease of Doing Business ratings issued by the World Bank. There are other rankings and specific studies focusing on competitiveness and productivity, so no one is re-inventing the wheel here.
One would have thought this issue would be very important in discussing the country’s economic future but somehow it does not seem to have featured in the Budget debate.
We now find that Malta is still way behind its competitor countries as regards competitiveness. These problems have been with us for years and years and they have still not been tackled. Any improvements that have been registered are minuscule. And, as we say in our analysis of the results, with regards to getting electricity, we have actually deteriorated.
On a wider issue, we cannot have improved our productivity if we consider the amount of people that have been taken on by the government both before and after the general election.
Next issue is the failure of our educational system. Each year we plough in a huge amount of money and yet the results remain dismal. We have opened the university for the top achievers and many do indeed go there, and we are creating a vast MCAST which takes in so many students but we still are faced with a hard core of students who leave school as soon as they can. And we still have factories and enterprises crying out for more skilled workers but unable to find enough.
Our leaders sparred and discussed the growth rates. The Opposition leader ascribed this growth to the inclusion of so many foreigners and he was supported in this claim by those who claim that Malta is a lowwage jurisdiction while the prime minister ascribed growth to openness to new technologies, etc.
We must analyse again what are the main components of this growth spurt. In particular, one must ask what factor is the contribution of the construction industry in terms of people it employs and what is the future that this industry contributes to the local economy.
To give an answer to this one must also factor in the depredations this industry is doing to our limited space and countryside. One must also ask what is the future of this industry as a whole when they will have finished pulling down houses and erecting apartment buildings. Again, this absolutely vital discussion seems to have escaped our leaders’ attention.
Next in this absolutely unstructured and incomplete list of outstanding issues is to ask ourselves why is it that we always seem to fall in the same mediocrity trap. We may argue in our justification that we are a small country but then we expect to be treated and respected as a sovereign country and a member of the exclusive EU but yet we fight shy of most attempts to do things right, to get things right and to try and compete with the best overseas.