Claim: Malta’s national wealth per person is now identical to Sweden’s, with Malta having caught up over the past 12 years.
Verdict: EU data shows that both Malta and Sweden recorded a GDP per capita of 110% the EU average in 2025. Malta has caught up with Sweden over the past 12 years, but that is as much down to Sweden’s dip as it is to Malta’s rise over this period.
In an interview on Sunday March 29, Prime Minister Robert Abela claimed that newly-released statistics show how Malta’s national wealth per person had now reached that of Sweden.
“12 years ago, Sweden’s national wealth per person was one and a half times higher than Malta’s. Today, we reached them,” he said.
The claim was met with incredulity, as many took to social media to question how Malta can even begin to compare with the notoriously wealthy Nordics.
Several others wrote to Times of Malta asking for Abela’s claim to be fact-checked.
What is Abela talking about?
Although he did not explicitly reference them by name, Abela was referring to GDP (gross domestic product) per capita figures published just days earlier by Eurostat.
GDP per capita is one of the main indicators of a country’s overall wealth and economic strength, showing how much wealth a country produces for each resident, on average.
The Eurostat data adjusts this figure to account for purchasing power, in order to provide a more accurate comparison across different countries with drastically different costs of living.
In practice, what this measures is not just how much wealth is generated per person in absolute terms, but how much that amount buys you in terms of a basket of goods.
Statisticians then calculate the EU-wide average and assign it a value of 100%, comparing each country against that figure to see whether they are above or below the EU average.
What does Eurostat’s data say?
According to Eurostat’s figures for 2025, Malta is one of 10 EU countries to have recorded a GDP per capita above the EU average, registering a value of 110%. This means that Malta’s wealth per person is, on average, 10 percentage points higher than the EU average.
One other country registered an identical score: Sweden. This puts the two countries in joint-eighth place in the rankings.
Both Sweden and Malta ranked just above another Nordic nation, Finland, but below several of Europe’s traditionally wealthiest nations, such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany.
Topping the ranking, by some distance, are Luxembourg and Ireland with scores of over 230%. At the other end, Bulgaria and Greece scored lowest, with a GDP per capita of just 68% of the EU average.
This, however, does not mean that Malta and Sweden’s GDP per capita is the same in real terms, before it is adjusted for purchasing power.
EU data shows that while Malta’s GDP per capita in 2025 hit the €35,000 mark, that of Sweden was just over €43,000.
Once adjusted for purchasing power, Eurostat lists Malta’s GDP per capita at €45,600, only marginally below that of Sweden at €45,800.
Did Malta catch up with Sweden over the past 12 years?
Yes, although Abela’s framing of this is slightly misleading.
While it’s true that Malta’s score is now on par with that of Sweden, that has as much to do with Sweden’s dip as it does with Malta’s rise.
In 2013, Sweden’s GDP per capita was 127% that of the EU-wide average, dwarfing Malta’s figure of 91%.
At the time, Sweden was one of Europe’s high-fliers, with only five member states registering a higher GDP per capita. Meanwhile, Malta was in 12th place, the highest-ranked country among those with a GDP per capita below the EU average.
This changed over the years.
As Malta’s economy grew, so did its GDP per capita, rising from 91% of the EU average to 110% today, with Malta climbing four places in the EU’s ranking.
Meanwhile, Sweden took the opposite route, with the rest of the continent rapidly catching up with the Swedes.
Over the following 12 years, Sweden’s GDP per capita dipped from 127% of the EU average to 110%, with the country dropping three places in the ranking.
So are people in Malta as rich as the Swedes?
Not quite, that’s not what this data talks about.
While GDP per capita measures national wealth, it does not specifically look into individuals’ wealth.
Several other economic metrics, from median income to household wealth, offer a more complete view of this.
For a start, there is little doubt that the Swedes earn more, in absolute terms, than the Maltese.
Swedish workers earned an average of €3,800 (or 41,600 Swedish Krona) each month in 2024, almost twice as much as the Maltese average, which is just above €2,100, data from the two countries’ official statistics offices show.
However, recent data from a Central Bank study gives a more rounded picture of Maltese households’ median wealth, showing that it has risen to over €376,000, mostly driven by a relatively high home ownership rate.
Swedish statisticians do not collect identical data for households’ median income, making it difficult to directly compare the two countries.
Nevertheless, other data suggests that the Swedes are in rude financial health. Net wealth per person in Sweden lies at just over €240,000, with the country’s national wealth reaching its highest ever point in 2024, according to Statistics Sweden.
Verdict
Abela is citing EU-wide data for GDP per capita, published by Eurostat last month.
GDP per capita shows how much wealth is generated for each resident in a country, not how much individuals earn or how much wealth households hold.
The data shows that, once adjusted for purchasing power, both Malta and Sweden recorded an identical GDP per capita in 2025, at 110% of the EU average.
However, Abela’s claim that Malta has reached Sweden over the past 12 years overlooks the fact that this is partly down to Sweden’s dip during this period, not just Malta’s rise.
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Abela drew an unlikely comparison when speaking on Malta’s national wealth. File photo: Matthew Mirabelli (main), Shutterstock (inset)
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Originally published here.
