Clearly, among the workers whose employment has been most under threat by the Coronavirus pandemic are those in the hospitality, restaurant and catering sectors.

The way by which the pandemic has spread and the resulting measures which needed to be taken to counter it, cut to the heart of how their work is done. It is doubtful whether their situation can really improve before a vaccine is developed to smother the virus when it reaches the human body.

Till that happens, even those brave ones who are quite prepared to defy all that could happen, will still do so while aware of the possibility that wherever they may go to buy a coffee, to enjoy a restaurant meal, to stay or attend a wedding at a hotel, they could get booked by COVID.

Other sectors of economic activity are less exposed to the disruption caused by the pandemic. Moreover, many people who work in the sector do so as selfemployed, even while depending on an owner who pays them for their work. Their situation has always been precarious.  Now it has become even more so.

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NUMBERS

Many of the forecasts we get about what could happen take the following shape: During a first phase, it is likely that the economy will shrink by this amount, and then during a second phase, it will rebound by this percentage, a rate that will decline somewhat in the succeeding year while still remaining steady. Or something of the sort...

The usefulness of such forecasting it seems to me, arises mostly by way of giving an idea regarding the magnitude of the efforts that will be needed to compensate for the economic upheaval that we have been experiencing. Still, in the very open bearings that this kind of forecasting provides about future developments, the probability is that it does not carry a good enough direction about how affairs will evolve, basically because it is too general.

I believe we also need a close-up look, sector by sector, that covers how each sector has been effected negatively or not at all by the crisis; how each sector will meet difficulties or not as it tries to take off again; and how while this is happening, sectors will be interacting with each other.  From this then, a general picture would emerge. It is likely that such a descriptive map could be more useful for the Maltese economy than elsewhere.

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CONSTITUTIONAL

The issue of whether the European Central Bank had the remit to buy on a massive scale bonds issued by European governments was raised before the European Court of Justice which had decided upon it.

That decision is supposed to be in force across all the European Union’s member states.

The German Constitutional Court again reviewed the matter and discovered that what the European Central Bank had carried out was ultra vires, should not have been done.

By any standards, this development was out of this world for two reasons: what the European Court has decided is suppost to be final and not up for reconsideration; what the Court says, should not be contested.

Suppose for a moment that it had been the Maltese constitutional court which did this: what would have happened?