The news that Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical arm, last week upgraded Malta’s gross domestic product growth from the provisional 4.1 per cent to 4.3 per cent for the third quarter of last year is certainly a boost for the government.

The announcement came right in the middle of an election campaign during which the Nationalist Party is placing great emphasis on the steady economic improvements that the country has registered over the past years.

That Malta had made such a progress could already be gauged by the fact that the country managed to reach the Maastricht criteria to join the eurozone as from 1 January this year. It did this in spite of the fears the Malta Labour Party was trying to instill that the country was not as yet prepared for such a move. Within a few weeks, the changeover from the lira to the euro has been fully absorbed and nobody even speaks about the transition anymore.

The Eurostat report that was published last week confirmed that Malta is on the right track, and that the results were even better than those anticipated.

The 4.3 per cent growth in the third quarter came after two quarters in which the growth was calculated as having been 3.6 per cent. It meant that Malta registered a growth that was higher than the 2.7 per cent European Union average.

Such results give the lie to all those who are insisting that Malta’s economy is stagnant and that we need to take initiatives to reverse the trend. They also mean that the Malta Labour Party’s target of “reaching an economic growth of between four and six per cent” if it is elected to government has, well, already been reached.

The Nationalist Party has for long been saying that the country’s economy has been moving up, and that the period of difficulty that was experienced three or four years ago is now just a memory. The Labour Party has always tried to belittle these achievements, but now it is clear that, in economic growth terms, the country has already arrived at the point that Labour wants to achieve.

This is not the first time that the MLP has promised something that has already been done.

The initiatives that the government is proposing – and which have been spelled out by the Prime Minister on the second day of the electoral campaign – will go a long way in putting the economy on a stronger footing.

The revision of the tax bands as indicated by Dr Lawrence Gonzi will put more money in people’s pockets and this will in turn mean that they will spend more, generating further economic activity.

This is a far cry from what the Malta Labour Party is proposing. For one thing, the decision, if Labour is elected, to reintroduce the system whereby public holidays falling on a weekend will be compensated with extra days of vacation leave is wrong.

What the MLP is doing is trying to lure votes by promising workers between two to five extra holidays per year, little realising that this will negatively affect Malta’s productivity and economic growth rate. Malta already has a high number of public or national holidays – 14 – and added to the 24 days of vacation leave, will give workers nearly eight full weeks of leave.

Foreign investors look at such things before they decide on whether to invest in Malta or otherwise and, as Parliamentary Secretary Tonio Fenech explained recently during a political debate on television, workers would be risking their jobs just for the sake of having some more free time.

At a time when there is practically full employment and foreign investment is flourishing, the implementation of the MLP’s proposal will be a step backwards.