Small, heavily populated islands are not dissimilar from large mainland cities. Their social and physical structures come under the same sort of pressures but cities have more viable options for managing them.
One major pressure is population growth. The National Statistics Office has published new findings from the 2021 census, providing more detail about the rapid demographic changes that have occurred in the last decade as a result of the government’s decision to liberalise the importation of foreign labour. Few countries, if any, have seen populations rise by 25 per cent within a decade.
The government has often touted the short-term advantages of this demographic phenomenon as an unprecedented economic success unmatched by any EU country.
However, the label “best in Europe” for economic progress is far from an accurate description of the realities that ordinary people are experiencing.
Population growth has indeed been a critical driver in Malta’s economic success story, along with low-interest rates and promotion of high-risk economic activities, including the sale of EU citizenship. But the long-term costs are likely to be more lasting. Inadequate, obsolete and dilapidated infrastructure is creaking under the weight of rapid population growth. The population of well over half a million presents a massive burden on the provision of potable water, electricity, education, housing, health services, transportation and waste disposal.
Big cities on the mainland can address such pressures by developing satellite towns accompanied by new infrastructure. Tiny countries like Malta with nowhere to expand only have one option – encroachment. That is, encroachment on rural areas, destroying the natural environment and on urban spaces to the detriment of aesthetics and built heritage.
While Malta’s healthy economic growth contributes to upgrading some aspects of our lifestyle and personal well-being, at the same time our quality of life is falling victim to the very driver of that growth. Rapid population expansion causes severe difficulties for a lot of ordinary people as it manifests in sub-standard living conditions, especially for low-paid foreign workers, traffic congestion, air, noise and light pollution, an overstretched public health system, inadequate educational provision and the gradual theft of open spaces.
The government has failed to sufficiently acknowledge the immense pressures that its economic policies have exerted on the physical and social infrastructure of the country. It continues to adopt a liberal approach to mass importation of low-cost, low-skilled labour, claiming that this is the only way the economy can grow and the way that social services, like pensions, can be financed without increasing taxes.
Tourism policymakers, for instance, still promote mass tourism that benefits from taxpayers’ financed subsidies in the form of electricity and water charges that do not reflect their actual cost.
The Planning Authority continues to dish out building permits, fearing that if the property development motor starts to stutter, the feel-good factor that is the holy grail of many politicians will disappear.
The nearer we get to an election date, the more difficult it becomes for policymakers to recalibrate their compass to guide the economy to more sustainable trajectories.
The stress on the social and physical structure may not have reached breaking point but we are not far from this critical stage.
No silver bullet can ease the pressures that fast population growth is exerting on people’s lives. Investing more in the infrastructure to cope with these pressures could have some beneficial effects. But for an overpopulated island with limited land area, rethinking the current economic model is the only viable long-term solution.