A New York Times piece on the troubles facing a steel factory in southern Italy asserted that closing the troubled factory would cost Italy 1.4 percent of its GDP. According to the piece, the plant directly employs 10,500 workers. That is a bit less than 0.05 percent of Italy’s workforce of 23,400,000. The piece is surely right in highlighting the importance of the plant to a very depressed region in Italy, but the claim its closing would reduce Italy’s GDP by 1.4 percent does not seem plausible.
That doesn’t seem very plausible, doesn’t it? And it’s especially implausible since the study quoted by the Times very clearly says that its estimate of the effect of closure is a 3.5 billion euro hit to GDP, or 0.2 percent of total Italian GDP. But hey, it’s just a number. Who cares if it’s right?
