Man is probably an optimist by nature. We are still in the middle of the coronavirus crisis and we are already talking of what may happen afterwards. Our health authorities are doing an admirable job, even if in some respects it is a thankless job.

As a country we could have been spared some decisions, such as the one to open spring hunting or allowing construction work in inhabited areas to carry on, to the detriment of those who are forced to stay indoors by law. But these are not the call of our health authorities.

Many people, both locally and abroad, are saying that life will not be the same again after the pandemic passes, if it will ever pass. If life will not be the same again, then our behaviour will need to change and, as a consequence, our economic behaviour as well.

It will be difficult to predict how things will change. However, if we were to go back to the last global severe economic crisis we had between 2007 and 2012, caused by the meltdown of the financial markets, and draw comparisons with the current one caused by the coronavirus, we recognise that things do need to change.

That crisis was caused by the excesses of the free market and a lack of regulation. Governments around the world responded to it by bailing out banks and corporations. They ran up huge public sector deficits which they then sought to rein in by weakening their social security systems. As a result, the public at large had to endure pain while the business sector flourished again, as could be seen by the performance of the financial markets over these last years.

Malta will not be exempted from the impact of such changes. We need to be flexible and rethink our economic strategy

This time round it needs to be different. I doubt if electorates around the world will be willing to pay once more through a policy of economic austerity. They will now expect businesses  to shoulder the burden of recovery and the price that has to be paid to go back to normality, even if normality then will be different to the normality we had before the onset of coronavirus.

The concept of globalisation of the economy may be dead. I would expect that governments ‒  in response to the demands of their electorates ‒ will not accept that businesses, which would have received state aid to stay alive during this current crisis, relocate their activities elsewhere because they would make profit. Governments are today spending public money to save jobs and will expect those jobs to remain there for a long time after the current crisis would have ended.

Equally, we may have the free movement of capital, but that could be subject to tougher regulation to keep as much capital as possible within one’s borders. As such, one would also expect governments to insist with businesses, which would have received state aid, to pay all taxes due and would not allow them to benefit from a more tax efficient regime of other countries.

Some analysts are also saying that one of the opportunities offered by the current crisis is that it could force governments to face up to the realities of climate change and truly seek to develop a green economy. Whether this will happen or not remains to be seen but I would expect governments to listen more to society and less to businesses.

Malta will not be exempted from the impact of such changes. We need to be flexible and rethink our economic strategy. As the external environment changes, we will be forced to think afresh. We will also need to think about what happens next.