This week marked the 41st anniversary of independence, a historic event the significance of which is still doubted today. For many, that event seems to have just a political meaning in that the head of government no longer was a person not elected by the Maltese population.

After that, Malta was able to take its rightful place among the world's nations and, as such, joined the United Nations and the Council of Europe. It was able to conclude agreements of a political and economic nature with other nations without requiring permission from anyone. Today, all this is taken for granted and may sound nauseating to anyone under 40.

However, achieving political independence placed on us as a country the requirement to earn our own living. Gone were the days when our country could depend on another country to prop our economy. Moreover, the value of Malta as a military base soon started to diminish fast (and, in any case, income from a military base could hardly be seen as a way of achieving long-term sustainable economic growth) and so we started a process of transformation of our economy.

One can rightfully conclude that this process of transformation has not yet been concluded and, up to a certain extent, our economy is still a developing one (not so much according to United Nations definitions but because our economy is very much alive and is constantly evolving in response to the international economic environment).

We need to go through this evolutionary process to achieve a better quality of life for ourselves and it seems that the stage, where an economy is deemed to have matured, is, in my opinion, still a long way ahead. Thus what we take for granted (namely our political independence) forces us to look beyond our shores and to look beyond the status quo to achieve economic growth.

And there should be no doubt about the transformation that our economy has gone through in these 41 years. Export-oriented manufacturing industry was still in its first stages, limited to a handful of companies and based on high volume and low value added. Today, the number of exporting companies is several multiples of that, the range of products manufactured in Malta is very wide and value added is medium to high, even if our companies can no longer be considered high volume ones.

Tourism amounted to a few tens of thousands of visitors, hotels were also very few in number and the marketing activity was focused exclusively on one country. Today we welcome to our shores over 1.2 million tourists from all over the world. The product on offer (even if it can be improved upon) in terms of accommodation, amenities and activities, bears no resemblance to the product on offer in the 1960s. Moreover, we have a cadre of Maltese hoteliers that are capable of investing not just in our country but also abroad.

The activities in the services sector (financial, maritime and other) are there for all to see and possibly offer the main opportunities for future growth. All this has been achieved while we have moved forward on other fronts as well - such as social policy, education, infrastructure and culture. Economic growth has been enjoyed by all.

I strongly believe that we should be jealous of our political independence while accepting fully that globalisation has moved the world towards interdependence. Even a country likes the US recognises that it cannot, for example, fight the war on terror on its own.

However, while recognising the importance of interdependence and the need to operate in an international economic environment, we should be very careful not to allow others to reap the benefits of the harvest of the good crop that we have sown. And we have sown some very good crops, irrespective of what is claimed by some people in this country.

It has taken us four decades to develop a manufacturing sector that is the envy of a number of countries in the EU, to develop a variegated tourism sector that manages to hold its own, to develop a financial services sector out of nothing and to develop a number of service activities that many of us had not even dreamt of 41 years back. We need some lessons from others to make sure our economy keeps on growing but we certainly do not need predators, dressed in sheep's clothing, offering us quick-fix solutions like we have had this week.

We should share the benefits of the hard work that we have put in if this would get us even even more benefits. EU membership should help us to achieve this goal. However, we should not allow ourselves to be lured into what may seem cosy relationships only to find out that we have become dependent on them. We have been successful in avoiding this pitfall in the past and we need to ensure that we avoid it in future. Otherwise, our economy would falter badly and our achievement of independence in 1964 would be of no value.