Besides Muscat’s survey, Bartolo and Cutajar also flagged other economic sore points – including the fact that Malta is still on the grey list, international moves towards a global minimum corporate tax rate, the European Commission’s stance against Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme, and increased public expenditure as a result of the pandemic and the Ukraine war.

“Borrowing money is probably the government’s only source of disposable income as it failed to create a single new industry in the past ten years,” they said. “The government must stop wasting money on corrupt deals and consider the economic proposals presented by social partners and the PN.”

Muscat’s survey, carried out by Vincent Marmara’s data research company Sagalytics, shows that private household consumption remains considerably lower than pre-pandemic levels.

This is despite a July 2021 survey showing an improvement in post-vaccination consumption levels and previous surveys indicating that people intend to significantly boost their consumption once they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19.

“The results of the current survey show a strong reversal in the trends on economic outlook that were consistently shown in the previous studies, and could also be attributable to non-pandemic related issues, such as the war in Ukraine,” Muscat wrote.

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