Economics
The economy that matters is the one people feel: the wage, the rent, the price of energy, and whether the next generation can get on. I write about growth and productivity, the state's balance sheet, and the cost of living, across the European Union, the United Kingdom and Malta. Sources shown, trade-offs named, no single-paradigm answers.
Output per person is the only number that lasts. On why growth by headcount flatters the figures, and where real productivity actually comes from.
Twelve omnibus packages have cut administrative cost while the investment gap stayed at €750 to €800 billion a year. The EU, UK, US and China compared on R&D, energy and productivity.
Britain and Malta both grew their economies by growing their populations. It flatters the headline and barely moves output per person.
Trade, technology and geopolitics are rewriting the rules every small economy plays by. What the new order rewards, and what it punishes.
Malta's growth has leaned heavily on imported labour. What a different model looks like, and the honest trade-offs of getting there.
An honest look at the Chancellor's growth, stability and investment pitch, and what it would take to actually land it.
What the state owns, what it owes, and the prices that decide whether industry survives. On record taxes, war bonds and the cost of energy.
UK net public wealth fell from a quarter of national income in 1970 to minus £695.7 billion. Where it went, and how to rebuild the state as a shock absorber.
On the accounts the label changes nothing, so where does a purpose bond do real work? Who lends, what the money is tied to, and the £450 billion in cash ISAs.
UK industry pays the most for electricity in the developed world, four times the American price. Why cheap energy is now a security question.
The economy people actually feel is the rent, the mortgage and the weekly shop. On housing markets, the averages that mislead, and the gap between the figures and the mood.
Rents have outrun wages in Malta and a flat now sells for around fourteen times a young salary. Every figure sourced.
True on the average, false in the distribution. The imbalances the headline house-price number is built to hide.
Mostly yes, with two revealing exceptions. A region-by-region look, every figure sourced.
GDP per head, inflation and jobs are improving, yet confidence sits at its lowest since 2023. The gap between the economy on paper and the one people feel.
You would not buy something valuable blind, yet that is roughly how Malta's property market asks people to decide. The case for open, usable data.
Why economics
I follow economics seriously and pluralistically, from behavioural to institutional, because no single school explains everything. The through-line is simple: productivity is what raises living standards over time, and most political arguments are really arguments about the economy underneath them. I keep analysis separate from conviction, and I show the working.
More about my approachA short guide to how this section reads the economy, and where the argument stops.
Pluralist and applied. I reason across schools, from behavioural to institutional to classical, name the framework I am using, and let the evidence decide. The focus is growth and productivity, public finances, and the cost of living across the EU, the UK and Malta, with every figure sourced.
The same pressures, on productivity, housing, energy and public finances, show up in a large economy that left the Union and a small one inside it. Reading them against each other separates what is structural from what is just local noise.
No. It is commentary and general information on economic policy, written from a centre-right position. It is personal and independent, and separate from the author's commercial and academic work.
Occasional, considered pieces on business, economics and policy across the EU, UK and Malta. No spam. Reply to any email to unsubscribe.
