That sentence is the Maltese productivity story in one breath.
We are about to spend another political cycle arguing about roads, ferries, planning, and the cost of living. We will spend almost none of it arguing about the asset that quietly underwrites all of those: the skills inside our workforce. Yet the numbers we already have should make that the main argument.
In 2025, labour productivity per hour worked in the European Union grew by 1.4 per cent. In Malta, it fell by 0.8 per cent. Only Italy did worse. In the same year, Maltese working hours grew by 0.9 per cent, second only to Czechia. We worked more and produced less per hour. That is not a one-year wobble. It is the logical end of a decade of growing wide rather than deep, layering sector on sector, importing labour, stretching infrastructure, and not investing nearly enough in what makes any of it productive.
The skills side of the ledger is no kinder. The European Union's 2030 target is for 60 per cent of adults to participate in training every year. The European Commission's Education and Training Monitor 2025 puts Malta's share of low-skilled adults at 29.3 per cent, against an EU average of 24.2 per cent. Inside that figure, training is heavily skewed. Roughly two thirds of highly educated adults take part in learning each year, against just 16.3 per cent of those with lower education. We are training the people who already know how to learn and leaving the rest behind.
On the schools side, one third of fifteen-year-olds in Malta are underachieving in basic skills. In PISA 2022, our fifteen-year-olds scored 445 in reading against an OECD average of 476, and below the OECD average in mathematics and science as well. The 2022 results were broadly flat against 2018. This is not a temporary slip.
Here is the part that should sting most for anyone who still thinks this is a money problem. Malta's spending on education and training sits at around 12.7 per cent of total government expenditure, the third highest share in the European Union. We are not under-spending. We are under-delivering. A serious country reads that sentence and asks one question. Where exactly is the money going, and what is it buying?
A centre-right answer to this is not louder ambition or more line items. It is five disciplines we have so far avoided.
First, excellence over inputs. Stop counting euros allocated to training. Count completion, capability gain, retention, and wage progression. If a programme cannot prove movement on any of those, it gets cut. No launch event survives that test on its own.
Second, responsibility shared. Employers cannot offload the entire skills bill onto the state, and the state cannot offload it onto employers. A serious country builds the rails together. Co-funded apprenticeships with real employer skin in the game. Public sector secondments into industry, and the reverse. Tax treatment that rewards durable training rather than glossy away-days.
Third, care for the weak that pulls people up, not in. The 29.3 per cent low-skilled adult share is the most important number in this article. These are people the system has failed most thoroughly. They need adult literacy, numeracy, and basic digital skills, taught by people who treat them with respect. Not blanket subsidies that pay them to stand still.
Fourth, efficiency in EU money. The European Social Fund Plus and the Recovery and Resilience Facility have channelled real capital into Maltese skills work over the past decade. The honest question, which nobody in office wants to ask publicly, is how much of that built durable capability and how much paid for projects that ended the week the funding ran out. The data exists. The audit is overdue.
Fifth, subsidiarity that lets Gozo plan for Gozo. A Gozitan skills strategy is not a smaller copy of Malta's. The labour market is thinner, the commute is real, and the brain drain to the main island is structural. Stronger local councils, with proper teeth and proper budgets, are closer to the problem than a ministry in Floriana.
None of this requires inventing a new philosophy. It requires deciding that learning and development is national infrastructure, on the same balance sheet as the harbours, the fibre, and the roads. Under-investment in it does not show up as a cracked pavement. It shows up as the manager in Mosta interviewing her twelfth candidate, the Gozitan graduate taking the ferry to Luqa Airport for the last time, and the public service that needs three weeks to do what its EU peers do in three days.
The SME owner I started with will keep interviewing. She will probably hire the better of the two candidates who could read a spreadsheet, and she will train them on her own money and her own time. Multiply her by a few thousand, and you have an economy improvising its way through a skills crisis that we are choosing not to name.
We name harbour dredging. We name road resurfacing. We name fibre rollouts. We can name this too.
References
Eurostat. Productivity trends using key national accounts indicators. EU labour productivity per hour worked, 2025 data (EU +1.4 per cent, Malta -0.8 per cent, working hours +0.9 per cent). https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Productivity_trends_using_key_national_accounts_indicators
European Commission. Education and Training Monitor 2025, Malta country report. Low-skilled adult share 29.3 per cent versus EU 24.2 per cent. Adult learning participation skewed: 16.3 per cent of lower-educated adults versus roughly two thirds of highly educated adults. https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor/en/country-reports/malta.html
OECD. PISA 2022 Results, Country Note: Malta. Reading 445 (OECD 476), mathematics 466 (OECD 472), science 466 (OECD 485). https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i-and-ii-country-notes_ed6fbcc5-en/malta_fabd54f0-en.html
6. European Commission. European Skills Agenda and European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan, 2030 target of 60 per cent adult participation in learning per year (raised from 47 per cent). https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eac/education-and-training-monitor/en/comparative-report/chapter-7.html
7. Cedefop. Measuring participation in adult learning: new targets, methods and data. https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/data-insights/measuring-participation-adult-learning-new-targets-methods-and-data