‘A two-faced Budget’

Chamber Of Small And Medium Enterprises – GRTU
Rating: 5/10

It was a “two-faced” Budget for the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises – GRTU, with one smiling at the economy and another bitter towards measures of encouragement.

While the GRTU agreed with Budget 2011 as regards the government’s economic and financial strategy, it could not comprehend the measures it had decided on.

Once again, it said, the Budget represented “the loss of an opportunity to seriously help small businesses to find guaranteed means of credit to renovate and look ahead with confidence in the shortest time possible”.

In a statement, the GRTU said it accepted that the economic strategy outlined in the Budget was correct and that the government was right to aim to curb the deficit and reduce public spending.

This was not just a matter of avoiding the €10 million penalty the country would incur if it failed to reduce its deficit but also because the GRTU did not agree with the old economic concept that during a recession, the government should abandon fiscal seriousness and let its deficit grow.

While admitting that the Finance Minister did right in adopting a decent amount of proposals presented by the GRTU and suggesting a series of studies and analysis on bureaucracy and extra spending, it has been insisting that small enterprises did not need words but “concrete schemes and money on the table”.

The Budget gave to the country’s small businesses practically nothing more than they already had thanks to schemes financed by the EU and organised by the Employment and Training Corporation, the Chamber said. It was doing right in assisting farmers, restaurant and accommodation owners, but it was giving everyone else only the “punishment” of the increase in fuel, which was considered an essential spend and would absorb what families received in the form of a wage increase.

The GRTU was convinced Malta would continue to win the battle against the recession – but more than through the government’s help, it would be through the initiatives and skills of the small enterprises, it said.

The government was making a major mistake in leaving these to face the storm alone, the GRTU said, maintaining that the problem of unemployment would have been overcome faster had the Finance Minister listened to its proposals.

It had presented an extensive programme of measures which, had they been implemented, would have encouraged the sectors it represented without being a burden on the country’s deficit, the GRTU maintained.