The pressures of the rise in Malta's population are plain for all to see nowadays: be it in traffic, the health sector, construction, housing prices, or whether you have electricity or not during peak summer periods.

Between 2015 and 2025, Malta's population grew by just over 30% - far and away the highest population growth across the European Union.

Finance Minister Clyde Caruana told a business breakfast focused on the upcoming Budget that, at the current rate of population growth, Malta is on track to reach a population of 800,000 by 2040.

But he placed much of the responsibility for the country's reliance on foreign workers on employers rather than government.

To increase production, he said, an economy needed either more capital or more labour. Labour had traditionally been the easier and cheaper option, leading employers to favour bringing in more workers.

Caruana said Malta could not continue relying on an ever-growing supply of labour if it wanted productivity to increase. "If you want to increase productivity, you need to have more capital and less labour," he said.

The solution, he argued, was greater investment in capital and technology rather than continually asking government to make it easier for employers to recruit workers.

Malta's employer bodies however rejected the assertion. The Malta Employers Association, the Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of SMEs said that it is a model that was encouraged first and foremost by the government, particularly as it lacked incentives to promote the increase in capital investment that the Minister spoke about.

Malta Employers, for instance, said it does not accept that the workforce model Malta now has was chosen by employers. It was arrived at, over years, in the absence of the capital incentives, skills pipeline and infrastructure that would have made the alternative viable, it said.

The Chamber of Commerce said that Caruana's remark "misdiagnoses the root cause of Malta's economic bottlenecks" and the Chamber of SMEs said that "it is unfair and overly simplistic to place the burden of Malta's productivity challenge predominantly on employers."

All said that they had put forward proposals on how to enhance the bureaucratic side of the Maltese economy in order to make investment more accessible and easier to manage.

The reality however is that it is a waste of time for either side trying to fight over whose feet the blame for the current situation sits at.

This time and energy would be better spent coming up with the solutions that would improve the quality of life of the Maltese and Gozitan people living in the country and having to face the detriments of this economic policy - irrespective of who is to blame for it - on a daily basis.

If Malta's population is truly set to rise to 800,000 people by 2040 - and that's without non-permanent residents such as tourists, who still create a burden on the country's infrastructure - then what is the country doing in order to have an infrastructure that can cope with that?

Can Malta - this tiny island state in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea - even sustain that amount of people?  Or are its people destined to live in an over-crowded, traffic ridden, power cut haven that vainly dreams of one day becoming some sort of Mediterranean Singapore or Hong Kong?

This Budget must set out a pathway that tells the country whether it is going to remain acceptable for Malta's population to keep growing by 15,000 people every year, while families have less and less children because the country's quality of life is continuing to deteriorate.

If that isn't the path that the country is to go down, then the government must present solutions - and a roadmap, although one that is different from the 2013 roadmap that has gotten the country here in the first place - to change the direction that the path is going down.