The incoming year begins, as it usually does, with a massive collective hangover and with economists all over the world competing to see who got whose predictions most wrong.

As we stand today, we acknowledge the fact that the most dire predictions that have been made about our continent and our currency have turned out to be figments of a fevered imagination. Other things we never predicted have happened, notably Isis.

A year back, nobody could have predicted the colossal fall of the price of oil, with crude oil almost being halved over the past six months.

We never forecast the Russian invasion of Crimea nor the collapse of the rouble because of the West's sanctions and the fall of the price of oil.

Most of the economies we are aligned with, especially the EU ones and the US, are gradually emerging from the darkness of the 2008 crisis, an improvement reached at a very high cost especially regarding those who are out of a job and the young people without a future.

But at the same time, we are also seeing new products or rather styles of living which, in a limited manner, are creating a new economy far beyond the tried and tested methods of the past.

Two such innovations are the travel innovation Airbnb through which individuals and families get to offer and in turn be hosted by other individuals and families; and Uber, the controversial app midway between a scheduled bus service and a taxi service.

Both have been instantly and immensely popular, despite the controversies and even riots caused by the latter. It may come as a surprise to find that Airbnb is actually available in Malta and that a recent university innovation sounded quite like Uber.

The value of these two innovations is in a very real sense that of creating a new style of living, a new economy that is popular, rather low-tech and instantly accessible, thus creating added value all around. One other advantage is that both, Uber especially, pull down walls of established ways and methods of doing things, hence the virulent opposition.

The world has been looking around for innovations that can kickstart the economy which years of austerity have kicked into the doldrums. We are not saying these two innovations are it: certainly on their own they are just straws in the wind.

Over the past decades, the world has seen technological breakthroughs which induced us to think this was the new world. Then, painfully true, the value of the innovations in mobile telephony, for example, or internet access, petered out and the rest of the world remained more or less as it had always been: a small minority with everything it could create and a vast majority of people eking out a difficult existence.

These two innovations, on their own, will not do much, but they can and perhaps they do change the way we perceive things and do things.

At the other end of the new year perspective there is, of course, the price of oil. It has been calculated that this reduction is the equivalent of a considerable push upwards of growth, or rather the equivalent of removing taxes. Countries which looked as if 2015 would be a year of tepid growth, if at all, suddenly spurt ahead.

At the start of the new year, it is as yet unclear how these developments will impact us. Malta is now on track, or should be, to a total changeover in the way we get our energy needs. But among the bases for this long-term project an oil price that is half that of six months ago certainly does not figure. Whether the new oil price is to stand and how will it impact on our national economy with our plans for energy generation is still to be seen.

On the other hand, however, people-generated innovations such as Airbnb and Uber may, or should, lead to more people-generated innovations that may make a change in the way we perceive our national economy.