The (in)famous budget has come and gone. As usual, it was dissected and put together again a number of times by politicians, constituted bodies, individual commentators, etc.

It was an important budget because it was the first one after the general elections and the EU membership referendum. So one would have expected the toughest measures imaginable, since we are years away from an election. On the other hand, we had a rather mild budget when you compare it to a number of others that have preceded it over the past number of years.

Some have said that the government has run out of ideas and could not have possibly taxed the so-called middle class more than it has done so already. Others have claimed that the government should not have taken certain measures, but then did not propose one alternative measure themselves.

Still others have attacked what is wrong with the budget but did not state what is good about it. Others more keep on harping on the fact that the government should reduce its expenditure but did not suggest one initiative how it could do this.

Then there were those that expected the government to announce initiatives that would have sought to increase employment through direct government intervention in the economy.

One may not have been totally surprised at these reactions. However, they do indicate that whatever measures would have been announced in the budget, the government would always have been faced with a situation where someone would have criticised it because, after all, the budget is nothing more than a redistribution of monies collected by the government in order to stimulate economic growth, maintain social cohesion, and provide services that cannot for various reasons be provided by the public sector.

Therefore, given the scarce resources that the government has, it shall always happen that someone feels that his needs have not been catered for enough or that he is carrying a disproportionate amount of the tax burden.

On the other hand, what really counts is whether we are in fact getting out of the economic slowdown that we have been experiencing in the last 24 months. One needs to continue emphasising that our economic slowdown has been mainly caused by the international economic slowdown, and the fortunes of our economy depend greatly on what happens beyond our shores.

Yet, it is equally important to emphasise that, in the last 24 months, our attention on the economy has been deflected to a much more significant extent than one would have thought due to the EU membership negotiations, and subsequent to that, the implementation of the EU acquis communitaire, the referendum campaign, the general elections and the settling in of the new administration (let us not think it was a continuation of the old one because we would be mistaken).

What the country went through during the past 24 months was very much like setting the scene for a profound change in an organisation. Results will take long in coming putting into doubt all the work that would have been done. Those that have experienced such changes know how disheartened one can get if one loses sight of the ultimate objective. However, this does not mean that economic recovery is just round the corner. It is not for two main reasons.

First it is not yet certain whether the international economy is out of the rut it got into. Second, we still need to get used to the new rules of the game that we shall be playing once we become members of the EU and to the playing field we shall be playing on.

The pessimists can have a field day in this scenario. They can count all the costs and cannot quantify any of the benefits. They can complain that nothing seems to be going right and can tell us what cannot be done without telling us what can be done. It is, however, the time to be positive - positive not as if everything is fine (because it is not) but positive as in seeking to find solutions (and bold solutions for that matter).

There is no need for solutions that seek to place all the cost on one segment of the economy and keep all the benefits for another segment. In effect, no one claims that one has not benefited from the improvements that we have had in our economy and in our society over the past 15 years. We have a fiscal deficit because there has been extensive investment in the telecommunications infrastructure, because the public sector has made significant investment in information technology, because the welfare system was sustained and not dismantled, because we have modernised the transport infrastructure, because the shipyards were left open to maintain industrial peace, and because of so many other things.

In their own way, all these have contributed to the economic well-being that we have had in the past years. It is with this in mind that all the social partners are expected to think positively to address jointly the challenges that lie ahead for our economy.

This implies that the employees' representatives can no longer act as if they were simply shop stewards; and that the heads of the business sector organisations can no longer act as if they were simply running their own business. This implies taking those decisions that on the balance of things, are likely to be of benefit to the whole economy even if some parochial interest would have been ignored.