Malta was the EU's best performer in employment between January and March, registering growth despite the battering that jobs have taken from the global recession.

Eurostat, the EU's statistical arm, said that when compared to the same quarter last year, Malta managed an increase of 1.8 per cent in its employment levels.

By contrast, most other EU member states registered a decline. The sharpest falls were in Latvia (-8.2 per cent), Lithuania (-5.1 per cent) and Hungary (-3 per cent).

In the euro area, the only other member states apart from Malta that did not see a deterioration in employment were Slovenia and Belgium, both of which saw a growth of 0.5 per cent over the same quarter last year, and Germany (0.1 per cent).

All other eurozone members were down, with Spain experiencing the most significant drop of 6.4 per.

The Nationalist Party will see Malta's performance as vindicating its chosen slogan for its failed European Parliament elections campaign - it had emphasised the government's ability to create jobs.

Eurostat said that when compared with the same quarter last year, employment dropped by 1.2 per cent in both the euro area and the EU27, after remaining stable in the euro area and increasing by 0.2 per cent in the EU27 in the fourth quarter of 2008. Eurostat estimates that in the first quarter of 2009, 223.8 million men and women were employed in the EU27, of which 146.2 million were in the euro area.