If anyone had told us, a year ago, that most of the world would be hit, and hit badly, by an international wave of recession the like of which the world has not seen for the past 60 years, we would not have believed it.

And if anyone in most of the other countries of Europe were to hear, over the past week, that this current year would see a modest growth, most of those persons would have reckoned they and their country were quite fortunate.

So too would any citizen of any country in the EU that the European Innovation Scoreboard 2007 found had moved up from “Catching-up Countries” towards the next level, which is that of the “Moderate Innovators”.

So too should any Maltese of whatever persuasion who considers what is happening around us – riots in Latvia, and in Bulgaria, sharp economic slowdown in Estonia and Lithuania, and more trouble brewing in Romania and Ukraine. Iceland wants to join the EU and the euro as soon as possible and, as for Ireland and the UK, the situation there is so bad it hardly can be explained except by those who are living it.

It’s either because we are so small that storms, like the meteorological one last week that was forecast as a “near-cyclone”, just pass us by. Or else the tsunami waves will reach us later, after they have reached just about everybody else. Or else, somehow – because we are not exactly known for this – we have somehow got it right, whereas others just did not.

Or maybe it’s a combination of all three reasons together.

Over the past few weeks, our people have been driven to distraction with dire forebodings and all the doomsayers going full-blast. That, and the government’s ineptitude over the electricity rates saga, put paid to most of the usual Christmas cheer. The rates saga, of course, still rumbles on, as the 11 unions who continued resisting the surcharge increases still act as if the rates have not been finalised yet, as if they still have to be adjusted, as if they have found a whole raft of mistakes in the DLT report, while expecting, of course, the directive to people not to pay until after 45 days have elapsed to nobble Enemalta.

The bills (even if on estimate so far) have come and they are not crippling at all. Post offices have been filled with people wanting to pay and to get rid of their bills, as they should in a sane society.

It will get worse, of course, as Malta’s core markets, the UK mainly, will crumble more and more into a recession that could have been avoided, had other policies been followed, as proved by other countries who, like Malta to a certain extent, will see a very moderate growth and return to better growth as from the middle of this year onwards – mainly ECB countries, which goes to show why other countries are so eager to get into the eurozone.

But so far, the impact has not started to hit the Maltese shores, despite the naysayers. It is true that some business has slowed, notably construction and related areas, but that comes from relentless over-supply in recent years, about which many warnings were made, including by this paper, but none were heeded.

The way ahead is no bed of roses and Malta, as the Innovation Scoreboard showed, still has a lot of catching up to do. Any other international comparison points in the same direction, whether it be literacy at a young age, post-16 tertiary education, IT literacy, the competitiveness index. Our wages are a fraction of what our counterparts get elsewhere in euroland, but to get to those levels we will have to improve – and greatly – our productivity and level of production. Thankfully, the government is hiving off workers from the wider government employment, but its expenditure patterns are still far too high to enable deeper corrections.

Beyond the immediate impact of the short term, the right decisions must continue to be taken to ensure the future competitiveness of the country. Politicians who choose short term alternatives will all fall by the wayside and the country will fall alongside them.

It is a lesson we should have learned from past recessions – recessions come so that we correct our mode of operation. As long as the country, and the world, are booming, no one notices if things are not being done in the right way, but once a cold front comes and the world is shivering, once a recession starts to bite, then one needs to start to consider deep surgery.

It is a matter of no small consolation to look around at what is happening elsewhere and consider that there would we be, had we taken a different policy direction. Even so, as one reads the papers and delves into the real-time blogs that have become a byword for the quick and the superficial, the unregulated outpourings of people whose identity one cannot really check, it would seem that many are still not so convinced that this is the right path, and that whatever other governments are doing (notably Gordon Brown in the UK) is the right way. Time will tell. Even so, it would be a particularly blind population that has no eyes to look around and draw the proper conclusions.