Following the referendum and accession, the magazine reports there are now ‘misgivings’ in Malta.

It explains that EU membership has posed significant business and fiscal challenges to Malta. Many EU opponents feared that membership would threaten the country’s protected ship repair industry as, to join the EU, Malta agreed to phase out subsidies to the business by 2010.

Other critics, it reports, contend that the government’s single-minded focus on the EU led it to ignore pressing domestic issues. “Because of a

sluggish tourism market, the economy has been effectively stagnant since 2000, with growth hitting just 0.4 per cent last year. Unemployment has risen to eight per cent, while the budget deficit is projected at 6.2 per cent of GDP this year, down from a whopping 9.7 per cent in 2003, when it was bloated by restructuring aid for the shipyard industry.

“The government’s convergence programme does not envisage getting the deficit below the three per cent ceiling for countries seeking to join the euro until 2006, and even that goal would require deep cuts in health and pension spending that ministers have not specified yet,” the magazine reports.

It quotes Evarist Bartolo (at the time Labour’s European affairs spokesman) who said he believes that Malta simply exchanged its colonial past for EU tutelage. “We still feel redemption can come only from outside,” he says ‘sardonically of his countrymen’ the magazine comments.

He says Malta still needs to tackle its perennial problems of corruption and poor management, which have contributed to the continuing fiasco at a long-delayed hospital under construction.

“A recent study by the Commonwealth Institute,” Mr Bartolo adds, “suggested that in small island States laws and regulations do not exist, only personal relationships. That is very much the case in Malta, where the private sector is almost completely dependent on the government for contracts.”

Meanwhile, the magazine’s previous issue, the September issue, ranked Malta as 28 on its Country Credit ratings, the same position Malta occupied in March, with a credit rating of 71.9. This is 2.2 better than March and 11.1 better than a year ago. Malta is just beaten by Slovenia but grades better than South Korea, Kuwait, the Czech Republic and Cyprus.