Plastic people

Plastic people help island's figures add up, by Ralph Atkins for the Financial Times:

Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, likes to boast that the expanding eurozone's population of 320m is greater than that of the US. Malta's entry from January 1 will allow him to inflate his figures by a cool 100m.

That is, he can if he includes the annual production of Playmobil plastic toy characters. The German toy manufacturer has made its famous 7.5cm-tall plastic figures on the Mediterranean island since the 1970s. But production has soared in the past five years, largely on the back of exports...The island's factory is gearing up to produce as many as 130m characters in 2008 - or double the population of France.

Malta offers inexpensive production. When Playmobil first arrived labour costs were a tenth of German rates; today they are still less than half. But Ms Ellul says the island's small size "meant you could get to decision-makers very quickly, which you can still today". Construction of its factory was subsidised.

Playmobil's success illustrates Maltese entrepreneurship. Michael Bonello, the central bank governor, reports that those arriving on the island for the first time often look perplexed. "You see this place the size of a napkin. There is not much: it is just rock and buildings. There are no natural resources. How do you explain the standard of living? What do we do? Where does the money come from? This is what people ask all the time. But there is a lot of entrepreneurship and ingenuity here.

"You hear stories every day of Maltese going out, doing business, finding business: the carpenter who started out in a garage here making furniture and today has his own factory and one of his orders was for a council estate in Wales, for goodness' sake." Entry into the eurozone will make life easier for tourists, while business will enjoy the greater transparency and lower transaction costs, Ms Ellul says.

The views of those Playmobil characters are not known.