GDP sensitivities

19 June 2014 By Edward Hadas Follow @edwardhadas

France is refusing to include involuntary prostitution in its measure of national output. The stance runs contrary to new European standards. It also exposes the problem with economists’ conviction that GDP can be ethically neutral. France is right. GDP purists are wrong.

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France will not implement new European Union standards allowing member countries to adjust their national economic output figures to include illegal drugs and prostitution, its national statistics office said on June 18. INSEE official Ronan Mahieu told Reuters that France will exclude the illegal drugs trade and illegal prostitution to its calculations of gross domestic output because such transactions are not always based on mutual consent.

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the French minister of the rights of women, and Joëlle Milquet, the Belgian minister of the interior, wrote in a letter to the European Commission: “Prostitution is not a freely agreed upon commercial activity. To believe that it can be is an ideological position, a mirage and an offence to the millions of victims of sexual exploitation around the world.”

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