It is difficult at this point to eliminate the political overtones from any consideration of world or country-specific finances, since most of the present problems in many country’s financial situations derive from political issues and decisions.

But even if one were conceptually and hypothetically to divorce political considerations from macro-economic decisions, there is so much to be learned from the situation of other countries around us.

There is no doubt that Malta, for a variety of reasons, has not been negatively impacted as so many other countries by the economic crisis.

But there is also no doubt either that in today’s fast changing world there is nothing so cast in stone that can withstand the crisis and its various impacts coming in from abroad. Malta may be an island but it is not secluded from what is happening in the world around it.

There is no doubt, either, that although one may posit various scenarios about the future and various options available, the over-riding concern should be one that sees the reduction of the public deficits and the paring down of the debt mountains that threaten to engulf many countries.

It is also true that a too one-sided insistence on austerity has brought many countries in crisis even further down than they needed to be. Hence the insistence on the part of many countries to balance the insistence on austerity with an equal insistence on growth.

But we still have to see whether this will really work. So far, to be blunt, the countries arguing for a rebalancing of growth, such as France, have not shown any significant improvement on their situation.

This brings us back to the political level (not that we, in this complex, pre-electoral period, can claim any immunity). The country to watch is Italy where things can go bad and even worse if either the forces negative on the EU and anti-German were to gain the upper hand. On the other hand, if prudence and common sense win, Italy can progress from the significant progress registered under Mario Monti to a more structural reform of the country’s economy which can lay the basis for a better future.

After all, the Germany we all admire today (and also which many fear) has come from being the “sick man of Europe”, as The Economist termed it some years back, to being the powerhouse it is today because a Chancellor (Gerhard Schroeder) took it upon himself to push, drag and kick the country to do the reforms that now are delivering fruit.

The moral of this is “there can be no progress without pain or sacrifice”.

Meanwhile, too, we are seeing sensible improvement in the countries which were the weakest over the past years. The most significant is Greece which has accepted to take a battering such as no country ever had to, but which now is beginning to see the fruits of the improvement. Tuesday’s upgrading of its credit rating, even if by any standards it is still abysmal, is highly significant. So too, the improvements that were registered in countries such as Ireland and Portugal.

It is the countries with great and seemingly intractable problems that seem to straggle. They seem not to understand what is amiss and they seem to have great difficulty in coming to terms with the problems and in dealing with them. The problems thus become greater and greater and get more and more complicated. In Spain, just to give an example, the banking sector has so far proved intractable to reform and now a further complication has arisen trying to seek the regionalisation, the federalisation, if not the actual splitting up of the country.

In Italy problems seemed to be getting solved through the unelected government but the approaching general election all kinds of proposals are being made, ranging from Berlusconi’s anti-German rhetoric to Beppe Grillo’s five-star anti-EU movement. It will only be after the coming election that the dust will settle and hopefully saner solutions prospected.

So we started to write this leader hoping to split economic considerations from political ones and ended up devoting more space and time to political issues. There can be no improvement or any sensible approach unless it has a political backing. The onus once again is on politicians. Speaking of those countries which had to suffer from so much recession, many of them found themselves in that situation because of politicians’ deeds or lack of action in the first place.