The past weeks, even before the election was announced, notice was being had of the economic growth that Malta has been registering.

The growth has been registered over many months and years and one spillover has been to clean up the public finances so much that last year for the first time in many years Malta registered a surplus.

We are now on the eve of an election, which is being fought on governance. The parties are daily coming out with various proposals which compete on the give-aways they offer to sectors of the population. This is all clearly electoral, to attract support and votes.

Beyond this, however, we all seem to lack an overall comprehensive plan for the economy.

The first thing we must understand is that a surplus registered over one year is still rather slim. Is this just a one-off? Can it fall foul of any unexpected wave that impacts our very open economy? Fortunately, the European economy is improving but what if another crisis comes along?

More fundamentally, what is really needed is political will to register a surplus every year, in good times and bad. Other countries show us how this can be done, such as by a constitutional agreement.

It is equally clear that our population is still lacking in skills, training, education and consequently ability. We are also backward in the contribution of women in the working sector, although we have caught up considerably in past years.

So far, as highlighted last week, we have relied on foreign workers to register a growth that would have been unattainable otherwise. We did try to do something to get more Maltese to contribute in the workforce but it clearly did not work. Nor did we really try hard, to say the truth. We kept giving away early retirement schemes and lavish jobs with the government.

We also have problems with productivity and competitiveness. Year after year the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business report has seen us overtaken by new and upcoming economies. The latest we heard, from the Governor of the Central Bank, no less, is to get the organisers to tweak the methodology how competitiveness is measured.

There are, of course, problems which need to be ironed out in various sectors of industry, especially those using old and outdated technology, and we do still have cemeteries of factories in the industrial areas.

There are some new skills and technologies that are coming in but they are still rather unsupported, regardless of what is said. They are surely unsupported by the banks which now come under ECB pressure to curtail lending.

But above all, we lack new areas for investment and development. It is a sign of our times that a possible area of development of logistics has not taken off for lack of interest.

The current problems in the financial services sector, about which we speak on our front page, and in related industries are quite threatening and must be solved not with words and promises that mean nothing but with a clear commitment towards transparency and equity.

We still have no idea how much damage has been done and we may be mad to think that anything can be kept hidden in the world of Wikileaks. We may be lucky if we change direction in this regard but it will take years to undo the damage that has been caused. We will most probably face not just pressure to clean up but maybe also lose our battle to avoid EU legislation that will hurt these sectors. We may also have lost the chance to attract to Malta companies forced out of Britain by Brexit.