Europe’s GDP – 5% generated by airports (ACI report): unravelling the statistics and philosophy

The well known and respected Amsterdam-based consultancy SEO Economics has recently researched a report on behalf of ACI Europe, which makes some impressive claims about the continent's airports: such as that they employ 14 million people (that's a country between the size of Belgium and the Netherlands). And that they generate 5% of the total European GDP between them.

More questionably: that such an increase in business has positive social implications such as on education, research and development, helps reduce poverty, improve gender equality, and even makes people happier.

Two examples given in the text here do lend support to the claims about education and R&D, at least.

The report is not a standalone one in that it must be seen (and was possibly solicited) in conjunction with two independent reports by European ex-politicians with gravitas, into (inter alia) the lack of investment in the EU and how to remedy it; how a concerted, joined-up transportation network policy is required urgently, and how to achieve even more decarbonisation across the entire air transportation network at the same time.

It isn't hard to see how this is ACI Europe playing its cards to ensure that airports get the best deal out of all this, because they - and the airlines - have been on the rack for years now, as sacrificial lambs to the God of the Environment.

The trouble is that the whole ball game has changed in a matter of a day with the election again of Donald Trump as US president. Like it or not, the airports business is now, as the other presidential candidate often said, 'unburdened by what has gone before' and must prepare itself for its own version of The Great Reset.