Economics, very much like law, is also about semantics. The article ‘Economic health check’ (The Sunday Times of Malta, April 27) is not correct when it states that in 2004 “the [Maltese] economy’s size” stood at €4.2 billion, and that this went up to almost € 5.2 billion a decade later.

This is a case of mixing up national income with national wealth. While the former represents roughly the value of goods and services produced by the citizens of a country in a year, the latter is the value of the real assets owned by them at any one point in time.

The figures quoted were described as “GDP”, and GDP is close to national income, but still not the national wealth, or “the economy’s size” in a country.

In actual fact we do not even have figures of national wealth or, as it is described, “the economy’s size”, being included in the national statistics of most countries.

The main reason for this data gap is that no official figures of national wealth (or capital) are really and factually available.

This, too, is why Romano Prodi (‘Why I felt I needed to aid Malta join the EU’, The Sunday Times of Malta, April 27) was, as so many others before and after him, also so mistaken when, basing himself on what he had simply “seen”, he told Eddie Fenech Adami that the Maltese are “well off”.

Who, and what country, was he comparing us to?

Not to say anything about the wide disparities that still exist, in terms of both income and wealth, in the country.