Malta has maintained its place atop the Single Market Scoreboard by virtue of having the best record of transposing European legislation among EU Member States. 

The scoreboard, released by the European Commission earlier today, measures the performance of the various Member States’ efforts in implementing Single Market Law, by recording the transposition deficit adopted at EU level and in each Member State.

Malta has managed to reduce the number of overdue directives by half to 0.2 per cent when compared with the previous scoreboard published in October 2015, the office of the Deputy Prime Minister said. Malta’s performance contrasts with an EU average of 0.7 per cent.

The Commission noted that Malta's performance in closing pending transpositions was above the EU average. 

Graph: European Commission

Malta also ranked highly better than other EU states in the time it took to transpose pending directives, achieving an average 7 months compared to the EU average of 10 months. Malta also recorded the lowest compliance deficit, reaching 0.1 per  cent versus 0.7 per cent elsewhere, making it the best performing Member State on this issue. 

The scoreboard notes that Malta now has two overdue directives to transpose into law, both in the financial services sector. Both should have been transposed in March 2015, the Commission said. 

Of Malta's 8 pending infringement cases, 3 are in the air transport sector. The Commission noted that Malta's infringement cases took an average of 51.2 months - more than 4 years - to be closed. 

That score is the worst among all EU member states, although the Commission noted that the score was improving and that a number of "very old pending cases", including 2 open for around a decade, pushed up its average score. 

Deputy Prime Minister Louis Grech said the result "reflects the priority that the Maltese Government gives to the transposition of Directives, particularly those that relate to the Single Market."