The background is that countries are required to contribute to the EU budget in proportion to the size of their national economies, as measured by something called their Gross Domestic Product GDP.
The UK figures apparently already include tobacco and alcohol smuggling, and the ONS also have plans to look at illegal gambling, music and software piracy, and fencing stolen property: all business transactions that are illegal but carried out by consenting buyers and sellers.
For now the ONS has concentrated on two sectors: the manufacture, cultivation and sale of illegal drugs; and prostitution. Both are dealt with in the same paper, which you can read here Inclusion of illegal drugs and prostitution in the UK National Accounts May Before we get to the detail I need to say something about a fundamental misunderstanding that runs right through the work done by the ONS.
This is simply based on the intuition that prostitution is illegal, and the reporting to government required to achieve corporate or quasi-corporate status would be a pointless risk. Other than that the calculations are very simple β even simplistic β and they go like this:. The main source is an Eaves β Poppy Project report which estimated the number of prostitutes working in London in It appears that they did this by ringing every massage parlour, working flat and escort agency they could find and asked how many girls they had working.
Their main conclusions were:. From these two statistics the ONS have concluded there were approximately 7, off-street prostitutes working in London in The Metropolitan Police have given an estimate of working on the street at any time.
