The European Commission’s staff have provided an interesting and worthwhile account of the Maltese economy for this year’s “European” semester (that season during which the economic management of EU member states is scrutinised and evaluated).
As happened in the case of other analysts, the European Commission needed to advance some criticism of our economy. Compared to how it dealt with other economies, this criticism sounded quite tame. Asking whether the economic momentum being registered is sustainable over the longterm is an almost obvious point to make. Other points raised should not be sidelined though: like for instance theone about the need for a substantial improvement in training and educational achievement; or about a more diligent management of the financial services and internet gaming sectors...
It seems to me that given the arising contrasts with the Commission’s report, the time has come for the “Economic Survey” that is published annually with the budget to be seriously updated. It cannot continue to be constructed only around the formulaic presentations devised during the sixties and seventies of the previous century.
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Interpretations
The interpretations of recent or ancient history that come up vary according to whoever is doing them and when they get done. Events of the last thirty years in this country... among which Malta’s entry in the EU and the electoral collapse of the PN... are undergoing this process. Mostly among PN opinion makers.
Personally I find comic the way they are now having to twist and turn in order to continue giving a “coherent” explanation of how events developed. The more they try to look far and deep, the more they get revealed as people who consider themselves exiles. They seem to resemble the Jews in Babylon, weeping over the loss of Jerusalem.
Yet, the “robust” interpretation of recent history is that Malta’s entry in the EU undermined the organizational basis on which Maltese society had been developed over the past century. The PN was inevitably going to end up among the “victims” of this transformation.
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Russian puzzle
The story of Skripal, the Russian ex-spy in the pay of the British, is ugly. With his daughter, he was the victim of a vicious attack that put at risk the lives of innocent people who were not at all involved inespionage. The story cannot but recall the fatal attack on Kim Jong Un’s uncle in Malaysia.
What is different in the two cases is that the Malaysian authorities released information that showed how the assassination of the Korean national was organized and who by. Up to the moment when I write this, it does not seem as if the same approach was followed by the British authorities in the Skripal case.
It is quite clear that the Russian government would have been interested in punishing whoever acted as a spy to counter the interests of the Russian state. But this by itself, does not provide sufficient confirmation that Russia was responsible for the Skripal attack.
The French government started out by affirming it would fully back measures against the Russian side once it was given information about who engineered the Skripal attack. By the following day apparently, the French government declared it was backing the British initiative without having been giventhe information requested.
There is much that is so very strange in the whole episode.