One of the benefits of our country's membership of the European Union, that will accrue to the Maltese economy, and therefore to the business sector and its employees, is the guaranteed full and complete access to the market of (probably) 24 other countries together with the full and complete access to a number of bilateral, free trade agreements that the EU has with a number of other countries, thereby guaranteeing us access to a number of other markets.
I find that the impact of this development is either not being understood or is being undervalued.
The reasons for this may be several and I very much fear that some of them are not even rational but psychological. How can one appreciate the possibility of access to a market made up of hundreds of millions of people and millions of businesses, when he is used to thinking of a market of just under 400,000 people or just a few hundreds of businesses?
When dealing with a specialised product or service, the potential market would reduce itself to a few tens of customers. The jump from one scenario to the other, that is from the one of non-membership to the one of membership, is a thousandfold.
The logical arguments may go on. Continued economic growth in this country can only be sustained if we manage to increase the export of goods and services. This growth cannot and will not happen at the levels we expect them to if we stay out of the Union.
One may claim that we already have full access to the member states' markets. However, we do not have guaranteed access.
The way the situation will evolve following the enlargement is still unknown and one can never exclude the possibility of having a situation where the EU might feel the need to impose tariffs or other import barriers to protect its members.
The recent example of the action taken by the US to protect its steel industry is still too fresh in our memories to provide any comfort.
The snag is that the attitude of most people would be to assume that things would remain as they are, and the present always provides more comfort than the challenge of the future. This is why I claimed that the impact of guaranteed access to the EU market is not fully understood and is undervalued.
We find it difficult to think of the EU market as our home market - for too many years we have lived with the notion that our home market is Malta and that, sometimes, is enough.
In fact, I have always found this latter line of thinking difficult to understand because it cannot be seen as a line of thinking typical of an island economy.
For example, this is something that distinguishes us from Cyprus, another small island in the Mediterranean. I have found the Cypriots to be a people accustomed to looking beyond their country's shores for business because they consider their market to be too small for them (even though it is twice the size of ours).
This explains their success in creating economic activity that is based on its geographic location close to the Middle East. While they were busy creating this export-based activity, we were busy squeezing every drop that our local market could afford, ignoring the exporting possibilities our location provided.
Cyprus developed into a regional centre of the eastern Mediterranean in the late '70s and early '80s, the period when Malta was happily developing and implementing an import substitution policy that bore no real fruit.
It may not be so odd to think of the home market as the main market for any business. This is the way most multinational businesses started off, until they felt that this home market could no longer fulfil their aspirations and started to consider the world as their home market.
However, what we are talking about here is not even a change of this dimension. What is being suggested is to have a natural extension of what we consider to be our home market from tiny Malta to the whole of the European Union, because the business producing a product or service locally would have the same guaranteed access whether he is producing that product or service for a customer in Birkirkara or a customer somewhere in France, Italy, Germany, or any other part of the European Union.
A number of Maltese companies have already negotiated this leap successfully, either by exporting directly or by selling their product or service to an exporter operating in Malta.
This so-called indirect exporter is facing international competition and is operating in the international market as much as the so-called direct exporter is.
I believe that it is not enough that a few companies make this leap - it is important that we all make this leap and start considering Europe (and not Malta) as our home market.