Yes, the EU is our guarantee for future jobs

The EU is Malta's only guarantee for the creation of jobs. I made this bold statement a few days ago in public and I reiterate it today.

Why do I say this? We really do not need any scientific studies or reports to come to this conclusion. All we need use is our common sense.

The gross domestic product per capita in Malta is about $9,000. The GDP is the sum of the production of all goods and services in absolute terms.

This total in value terms is divided by the population of each country in order to give it a meaning in relative terms and is also then translated in US dollars to be able to maintain an equitable comparison between the different countries around the world. In this fashion, economists measure the relative wealth of each country.

Now, as I said in the past, the EU member states declared that Malta, with its GDP per capita at only $9,000, is very much poorer than the existing member states and, in fact, Malta's GDP stands at only 56 per cent of the EU average.

The EU stands for solidarity in everything including our wealth or lack of it and, therefore, wants us to become a rich nation, just like all the others on average. Therefore, the EU is fully committed to grant us assistance, not only financially, in order for us to become richer.

They have thus offered a financial package of a net Lm81 million to finance our infrastructure so that we can have a better standard of living.

However, the only way for our GDP to increase is for Malta to increase the production of goods and services. Now how are we going to improve this GDP when our market of 380,000 population is nearly already saturated? Thus, the EU also opened all its markets to us and removed all barriers in order for us to access their 500 million population.

However, let us be realistic. I do not believe there exists a Maltese company today or in the future that is capable of accessing this total population.

All we need is just one per cent of this market, that is, five million people. If we were to have direct access to just one million of this new market, we would already be tripling our production of goods and services, let alone with five million.

If we were thus to treble our production of goods and services, with our population remaining more or less constant, we would have a big boost to our GDP per capita.

This increase in the production of goods and services does not come down like manna from heaven. Maltese employers and the country's workforce will produce it and, therefore, it translates into a guarantee of increased jobs in the future because this increase will not occur overnight but in the many years to come.

I must also admit that, yes, there will be some sectors of the economy that will be hit as they will become uncompetitive.

But let us not view this as the end of the world. All I have to do is take you back to the 1970s and early 1980s when the manufacturing industry was entirely dominated by the textile industry, which had come to Malta to take advantage of the cheap labour, artificially provided by the government of the day through wage freezes.

When the liberalisation of the economy took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the bulk of these foreign textile companies left Malta.

What happened to this labour force? There was no massive unemployment. In fact, nearly all of these workers found jobs in the other emerging sectors of industry, namely the electronics and precision instrument industry.

This clearly shows the capability of our workforce, which was able to learn new skills of a much higher, sophisticated nature. In fact, unemployment in the mid-1990s fell sharply to almost full employment levels.

This is why I can boldly say that the EU is definitely our only guarantee for future jobs.

My fear is that we might not have enough people when production of goods and services really take off.

So why are some scaring the labour force?