Mediterranean Sweden, or far-fetched comparison?

On Sunday, Prime Minister Robert Abela told the party faithful who tuned in to ONE TV that “the national wealth person to person (in Malta) is now the same as Sweden.”

According to recent Eurostat estimates, the Prime Minister’s claim is, strictly speaking, accurate.

When looking at Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, which is basically the country’s total economic production divided by its population, Malta and Sweden are neck and neck, performing at 10 percentage points above the EU average.

The Prime Minister framed this argument in a 12-year context, adding that Sweden’s per capita wealth was one and a half times greater than Malta’s before the Labour Party was elected.

However, reality has a habit of being more complicated than a good soundbite that borrows heavily from the Labour Party’s infamous, old slogan: Svizzera fil-Mediterran.

The symbolic sleight of hand is significant – we don’t need to picture a future where we’ll be as wealthy as a postcard country like Sweden or Switzerland. The argument is: that future has arrived, and you have us to thank for it.

In the source notes beneath Eurostat’s data on this subject, a specific paragraph adds a caveat noting that “volume indices are not intended to rank countries strictly” and that “they only provide an indication of the order of magnitude of the volume level in one country in relation to others”.

A look at other relevant databases suggests that Malta and Sweden’s high-flying economies do not necessarily translate to equal pickings for their respective citizens.

Actual Individual Consumption (AIC), for example, looks at all goods and services actually consumed by individual households.

Data from 2024 shows that Malta scored eight percentage points (92) below the EU average (100), while Sweden scored five percentage points above the same average (105).

In real terms, Swedish households consume more than Maltese households do.

As for income inequality, which is usually measured using a 0 – 100 scale known as the Gini coefficient (zero being perfectly equal and 100 being perfectly unequal), Sweden scores 27.6, while Malta scores 30.8, indicating a sizeable disparity in the income levels reported by citizens in each respective country.

So, while it is true that Malta’s economy performs roughly as well as Sweden’s in terms of how productive each country’s population is, a broader look at the context suggests that Maltese households on the lower end of the income scale have less spending power than similarly placed counterparts in Sweden.

When factoring that in with differences that can be observed in day-to-day aspects of life, the comparison starts sounding like a stretch.

Besides primary financial concerns like cost of living and spending power, Maltese citizens consistently rate traffic, the economy and public finances, population growth, corruption, and the environment as their main concerns.

In that respect, our roads are more congested than even the busiest Swedish cities (which are also far less densely populated), our debt is expected to surpass a record of €12 billion, corruption is arguably at an all-time high, and our planning and environment regime is only set to get worse.

Though comparisons between different nations with vastly different contexts can extend into many different aspects of daily life, the comparison between Malta and Sweden falls apart even when viewed solely through the same economic lens that the Prime Minister uses to elevate the government’s achievements.

When the additional context of bread and butter issues is brought in, the comparison becomes disingenuous.