This year’s hurricane season that affected the south-eastern part of the US has shown how important infrastructure investment is to ensure the things we often take for granted are there when adverse events assail us. It is so easy to take physical and social infrastructure for granted.
When commenting on the effects of Hurricane Irma in Florida, a CNN reporter said the best way he could describe the present situation in this prosperous state was to say that Florida is a ‘paradise lost’. The infrastructure of the state is grossly inadequate to cater for the effects of hurricanes that occur regularly in this part of the world.
Houses built mainly with wood and easily detachable roofs, roads that stretch for miles on flat planes that are only a few feet about sea level, and seas surge protection walls that are grossly inadequate are some of the infrastructure issues that Florida has to address to regain its importance as a tourist magnate and an idyllic retirement destination for millions of Americans.
Near home we often watch on TV the devastating effects of just one night’s heavy rainfall in major Italian cities like Genoa and more recently in Livorno. Opposition political leaders exploit the situation by attacking the government for such predictable disasters.
Government ministers order inquiries to pin the fault on corrupt contractors who failed to execute publicly financed environment protection projects according to requirements.
We may not be exposed so often to disastrous and dramatic environment calamities, but we surely have major weaknesses in the way we manage our infrastructure. The obsession with measuring economic and social success by the growth in GDP or the fall in unemployment leads us to miss the woods for the tree.
Work, of course, is a priority and only economic growth can create productive jobs for our people. But economic growth needs to be sustainable and this can only be achieved if we concentrate on improving the economic and social infrastructure of our country.
Malta’s road network was never built to handle the amount of cars presently on our roads. Great efforts have been made to tackle the problem in the short term but these measures are just stop-gap measures. Building new roads, whether overland or subterranean, requires massive funding spread over a number of years.
The loss of open spaces, aesthetically ugly buildings, lack of parking spaces and the shrinking of our countryside can best be described as paradise lost
Our overbuilt island is already massively affected by disruptive construction projects, but we can no longer postpone the investment in improving our road network.
The social infrastructure is no less important. For more than a decade little investment has been made in social housing.
This has now resulted in an increasing worrying trend where homelessness and inadequate decent accommodation are threatening the well-being of a significant part of our society.
If the private sector shows little interest in providing social housing at an affordable price, then government should intervene and accelerate investment in new and used housing units for those who cannot afford to buy or rent their homes.
This will, of course, strain public finances with no immediate effect on GDP apart from the economic activity generated by the construction projects. But it will certainly strengthen the position of those who are most vulnerable in our society and who aspire to be contributors to economic growth in future. Projects for the preservation of our environment are equally important to improve the quality of life of our people.
Economic growth is partly the result of the massive investment in real estate that has helped the construction industry to create a boom that in turn whets the appetite for even more investment if not even speculation.
I fear that for many the loss of open spaces, aesthetically ugly buildings, lack of parking spaces and the shrinking of our countryside can best be described as their paradise lost.
It may not be too late to partially regain this paradise if we really invest in preserving what little remains that is aesthetically beautify in this country.
Another building block in our socio-economic infrastructure is our educational system. Educational underperformance is evidenced in Eurostat figures that show how Malta lags behind most EU countries in preparing young people for the workplace. The problem is not that we are underspending. We just lack the vision of what we need to achieve and, more important, we lack the ability to deliver. Improving the quality of life of our people is as tough as promoting economic growth and job creation.
johncassarwhite@yahoo.com