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Wednesday, July 16, 2025

UK to count prostitution, drugs when measuring GDP

by

20140531

LON­DON–Sex please–we're British.Britain's Of­fice of Na­tion­al Sta­tis­tics said pros­ti­tu­tion and the im­port, man­u­fac­ture and con­sump­tion of il­le­gal drugs will be count­ed when mak­ing the gov­ern­ment's quar­ter­ly cal­cu­la­tions of gross do­mes­tic prod­uct. The sta­tis­tics agency said yes­ter­day some of these ac­tiv­i­ties are le­gal in cer­tain Eu­ro­pean Union coun­tries, and com­pa­ra­ble fig­ures are need­ed. All mem­ber states need the same stan­dard be­cause they are used to as­sess a mem­ber state's con­tri­bu­tion to the EU bud­get.

"As economies de­vel­op and evolve, so do the sta­tis­tics we use to mea­sure them," said Joe Grice, the ONS's chief eco­nom­ic ad­vis­er. "These im­prove­ments are go­ing on across the world and we are work­ing with our part­ners in Eu­rope and the wider world on the same agen­da."At the mo­ment, the on­ly il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ties in­clud­ed in GDP are es­ti­mates on al­co­hol and to­bac­co smug­gling.

The ONS said that the new es­ti­mates would add ap­prox­i­mate­ly �10 bil­lion (US$16.7 bil­lion) to the lev­el of GDP in 2009.That said, it re­mains a small por­tion of Britain's over­all GDP, which now stands at �1.5 tril­lion.

AP


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