Basic Economy. Luxembourgers have a saying, "Just as Egypt is a gift of the Nile, Luxembourg is a gift of iron." For centuries, the country sat atop a large field of iron ore that contained too much phosphorous to be made into high-quality steel, but in 1877 the British engineer Thomas Gilchrist invented a method of removing phosphorous during the smelting process. Steel production dominated the economy for nearly a century and transformed a very poor, mostly agricultural society into one of the world's wealthiest industrialized countries. At its peak, the steel industry employed one-fourth of the workforce and generated two-thirds of exports, but when world demand for steel plummeted in the 1970s, three-fourths of the steelworkers were laid off. The iron ore fields were closed in 1981, and the surviving steel industry makes specialized products with imported ore.