The Pensions Bill should become an Act of Parliament by next week, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said yesterday.
Closing the annual general meeting of the Malta Employers' Association on Maximising The Potential Of The Maltese Labour Market, Dr Gonzi said pension reform was an area his government tackled in a comprehensive and serious manner as it had wide-reaching implications for the Maltese labour market.
Dr Gonzi said services were the economy's main growth area in recent years. Investment in information and communication technology offered great opportunities as Malta had the potential to become the information technology capital of the Mediterranean.
The Prime Minister said that following extensive consultations with various stakeholders, an industrial strategy for Malta has just been published. This would be crucial for further economic growth and employment opportunities. Similarly, a national strategy for research and innovation was also commissioned as this was an area that was essential if the economy is to become a world-class player.
The country was also working on updating the Business Promotion Act in order to adopt a flexible legal framework with the aim of sustaining and stimulating new investment.
MEA president Pierre Fava said that just as businesses could no longer count on secure markets, employees were coming to terms with the fact that job security was becoming a thing of the past.
Labour market policies were shifting the emphasis from job to employment security. The European Union was also concerned with the fact that it was lagging behind other developed economies in many respects.
Productivity was higher in the United States, workers were better educated and trained, labour markets were more flexible and there was better job mobility. The average European remained in the same job for 10 years; the average American for six.
The average labour participation rate in EU countries was also lower than in other economies, and the labour market was subject to rigidities that did not exist elsewhere.
Investment in education accounted for 2.9 per cent of the GDP in the US, as against 1.5 per cent in the EU, whereas the level of entrepreneurial activity in the US was 11.8 per cent compared to less than an average of six per cent in the EU.
Only 20 per cent of the labour force completed tertiary education. The corresponding figure for the US stood at 40 per cent.
This vulnerability was threatening the sustainability of the European social model, particularly considering that the labour force in the EU was ageing rapidly.
After 2017, demographic trends predicted that both the size of the working population and the number of persons employed in the EU would face a downward trend, and this threatened the Lisbon Agenda ambition for the EU to become a knowledge-based society.
Education Minister Louis Galea said the labour market employed 139,000. Although the country had almost full employment when it came to males, there was under participation by women and active elderly.
Dr Galea said that although, according to the Labour Force Survey, some 5,000 women wanted to find employment, only 1,500 were registering for employment with the ETC.
He said the country had slashed the number of early school leavers over the past five years and 70 per cent of 18-year-olds were still in education.
MEA director general Joe Farrugia said that as at September, 29.27 per cent of the 7,184 registering for employment were aged 20 to 29; 20.91 per cent, 40 to 49; 20.19 per cent, 30 to 39, 16.36 per cent were over 50 and 13.2 per cent were aged 16 to 19.
While 95 per cent of employed males had a full-time job, working women in full-time employment amounted to 78 per cent.
He said that 0.1 per cent of employed males and 2.3 per cent of employed females worked full time with reduced hours and 4.9 per cent of employed men and 19.7 per cent of employed females worked part time.
Mr Farrugia said that while the official unemployment figure stood at 7,000, the real figure of people who genuinely wanted a job was closer to 2,000.
MCAST principal and chief executive Frank Edwards said the college should be made a centre for lifelong learning.
If Malta was aiming to be as good as the rest of Europe it was setting its sights too low. "We must aim to be better and compete on productivity," he said.
Keith Psaila, head of the Parliamentary Secretariat for Small Business and the Self Employed, said a pilot project was starting in six primary schools as from February, giving children an entrepreneurial experience. And the university would be running a course in entrepreneurship next year.
Danish guest speaker Henrik Schilder, vice president of the social affairs committee of the European Centre of Enterprises of General Economic Interest, gave a presentation on flexicurity, a combination of easy hiring and firing and high benefits for the unemployed.
The three elements of flexicurity, he said, were a flexible labour market, a social security system and an employment and training policy.