Understandably, we all tend to look at the annual budget speech from our personal perspective: whether we will be better-off or worse-off after it, what we will pay in taxes, direct or indirect, what we will gain from the government's munificence, whether prices will go up, what our pay increase will be, and so on.

In the end, that is, after all, what matters. The sum total of our individual judgements on the Budget Speech will make up the country's reaction to the government's management of the economy.

Governments all over the world try their best to spin that the budget is the best on offer, a budget without thorns, a budget that will improve the standard of living of citizens. The very fact that governments bring out all the stops and maximise all the very small nuggets found in the Budget Speech proves that a budget, actually almost any budget, depends very much on the grateful acceptance of the citizenry. It is not automatically acknowledged as the best were it not for the spin.

Over the past years, and budget after budget, our media goes into overkill on Budget Day, first with a long and tedious speech in Parliament, so different from television's usual fare, then, immediately afterwards, with interviews from the corridors of power that either praise the budget to high heavens or denigrating it for all it's worth.

Then there are further tedious conferences and later, interminable debates on every television station, with everybody repeating what the leaders have said. Then the House meets again to hear what the Leader of the Opposition has to say, and later what the Prime Minister has to say. After which daily debates follow on each ministry and minister. By the time the debates end, it will be almost Christmas and the budget will be forgotten.

Except, obviously, its impact. Here lies the rub. Governments periodically run out of time. Their time span is officially five years, which is very short for anything substantial or structural that needs to be done, and many times governments find they have less than that. Consider this: the present administration is continuing a number of projects that had been thought up, planned and prepared by the preceding administration. Some, such as the Interconnector, the new Parliament, etc, still await their inauguration date.

Likewise in economic management: the government first announces, then legislates and only then puts into practice. Thus a government, for instance, first announces a tax cut, then the appropriate law has to be approved by Parliament, then a Legal Notice has to signal the beginning of implementation, and only then will it be put into practice. By the time this has come around, its impact is rarely dramatic, usually nuanced and sometimes it goes missing.

For instance, I defy anyone to prove the electricity rate cuts last March were all that drastic as they were made out to be. I am not saying they were not there, but with ARMS sending bills sporadically most of the time, and sometimes based on actual figures and sometimes on estimated figures, it will be someone who keeps all bills on file who can work out the savings made.

So too, under the previous administration, were the cuts in income tax. By the time these became effective, their impact was lost. Being a person on a fixed income, I find my income last year increased by COLA and the tax bill, given this increase, was just a few euros short of the bill for the previous year. For many others, there are moveable scales which make any comparison impossible.

Today, with Malta in the EU and in the euro group, there are more complex international measurements of a government's economic management than just what people estimate the budget gave/took away from them. There are also ratings agencies that analyse data far more minutely than we do and who are not at all subject to the government's spin.

Whoever governs Malta is then subject to pressures and currents that are not under its control. With membership of the euro, Malta, like all countries in the eurozone, has lost its ability to correct its situation with, for instance, a devaluation. Being in the eurozone means Malta is part of an economic bloc that is facing stresses and problems that other blocs do not face. We used to think that the EU, and the euro, had weathered the crisis and on their way to growth. The latest figures show that while the euro is in better shape today and no one talks of the euro collapsing, it has slid down to a depression that resembles the lost decade of Japan. Of all the economic blocs, the eurozone is the one with the least growth. And also, one may add, with the highest levels of unemployment. It's not just a lost decade, we are talking here of a lost generation, plus possible political repercussions in many countries, from Syriza in Greece to Marine Le Pen in France.

As a country we may be small and agile, but we do not have the economies of scale that give our government anything more than a razor-thin edge, a tightrope exercise, without the means to do anything structural. This is mostly the same predicament that other countries in the EU find themselves in, except for Germany, maybe.

Take Italy or France, for example. The massive debt Italy has impedes the government from taking real steps to foster growth. The weight of the unemployed (and also those employed by the government and the local government) is so enormous that it impedes the government from cutting taxes and stimulating the economy as it would like to. It knows what the way forward should be but is incapable of taking it. Meanwhile, time passes and voters get austerity fatigue.

In France, the problem is more political in that the Socialist base, even while knowing it is doomed, does not allow the government to break out of the rigorous outdated model of Socialist economic planning and keeps insisting, for instance, on the 35-hour week and fixed contracts which push so many youths into unemployment or emigration.

Looking around me, I see the massive influx of EU citizens from beleaguered countries, not just Romania or Bulgaria but increasingly Sicilians. That, in a way, is a backhanded compliment: they have fled their own countries that are mired in recession and unemployment, to this country that boasts it has emerged unscathed from the years of crisis.

We would be wrong to do, as Cameron is being urged, to forcibly remove all EU migrants from Polish builders to Romanian scroungers. It has been proved that the EU migrants produce more value-added to the British economy than they take in social transfers.

But I still have to see, and tomorrow I will be looking for it, signs of a structural way ahead, rather than one based on expediency, or based on pandering to powerful constituencies such as developers, one based on ensuring the country's survival and growth in a sustainable manner.

We keep hearing of ratings' favourable comments but we seem to forget their warnings. Where will the pledges be, in tomorrow's budget, to improve our competitiveness, to address the low rate of employment, to upgrade our skills, to address the pensions issue, and so on?

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