A few days ago, the Minister for Finance and Employment, Hon Clyde Caruana, delivered the Malta budget for the year 2023. As expected, many comments regarding the division started coming out. Surprisingly or not, most comments had a negative tone.
One of the main issues the population of Malta and professional analysts recognized from this specific budget division was that it is wholly focused on short-term stability. When running a country or any business, it’s definitely not recommended.
Here’s Why
Implementing short-term strategies when budgeting a country is like running a marathon with your head down. You might be running fast and watching every step you make, but in the end, you don’t even know where you are going and what the road will bring after that next step. This is a common problem Malta has as a country, and it’s an issue that residents are slowly noticing with some of the decisions made by the people above us.
Malta’s economy is an excellent example of it. For years the government has been focused on fixing the country’s problems with super glue fixes. It is not a question of making people happy for two years, only for them to realize that the so-called plans that were made to support regular families’ support in income collapsed because of unwise fiscal planning by the government. Not to mention the fact that the cost of living has risen by an average of almost 4 euros for the regular Maltese Joe.
Malta’s economy is based on a few essential pillars like international investment, tourism, and manufacturing.
This is why the government was unwise to not put more emphasis on the macro, as it went with the crowd-pleasing micro approach. The government should consider the fact that it needs to have a considerable mount of money invested in efforts to restore trust of international investors. As they were the bread and butter of our banking sector, it could be detrimental if our banking-based economy will continue to live in a stalemate. The loss of investor’s trust because of cases like Satabank and Pilatus bank have caused us more potential harm than the budget might reflect.
There is a continued need for the public to keep an observing eye on the choices of its government, most of all its financial authorities. The public should not be persuaded by fancy talk of politicians that want to make us feel as if our problems are completely over. We are smarter than that.
How Malta’s new budget completely ignores our economy’s bigger problem
