Malta is in favour of further measures to boost the eurozone’s competitiveness and will be presenting its proposals in the coming weeks.

Speaking to The Times Business following a meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday, Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said however that not everything being proposed by France and Germany necessarily reflected the position of the Maltese government.

“We are surely in agreement that more should be done to make the eurozone more competitive in the global economy. However, we are against a one-size-fits-all approach and we have our own proposals.”

“The government is already scrutinising the proposals made in this ‘Competitiveness Pact’ and should be in a position to make its own recommendations during a special eurozone summit in March,” Mr Fenech said. Earlier this month Germany and France, the largest eurozone economies presented a blueprint of proposals aimed at introducing specific measures across the 17-member bloc including the need to set a harmonised pensionable retirement age, common corporate taxes, constitutional government borrowing limits and the end of associating wage increases with inflation.

However, several EU members criticised the way these proposals were put forward and the EU has now scheduled a special summit for eurozone leaders on March 11 to start the discussions on these proposals.

Belgium, Portugal, Ireland, Austria, Poland and Luxembourg have already taken issue with specific suggestions in the pact. Finnish Finance Minister Jyrki Katainen became the latest to express doubts stating that he was a bit confused about several proposals of the new package.

Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker agreed, saying: “Nobody, at least not me, is against increasing the competitiveness across the eurozone, but we need to determine whether we need new instruments for that, or whether the existing ones suffice.”

However, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy – in a video message released on the same day as the eurozone meeting – seemed to come down on Germany’s side, saying the EU must “go even further, precisely to strengthen the competitiveness of each economy, so that each country in the eurozone grows in the same direction”.