What is it about?
Prostitution is a phenomenon that is widely romanticized, and just as often vilified, but hardly understood. One of the problems is that we hardly know how much money is earned and transacted in the sector of commercial sexual transactions. This article proposes a methodology that is able to calculate such estimates in wealthy countries, and applies this methodology to Belgium.
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Why is it important?
These estimates are important for policy, because they tell something about the economic size of prostitution. If this approach would be repeated, either in other countries or in the same country at a later time, the use of course increases a lot. In those circumstances, one is able to assess how policy and law affect the market for prostitution.
Perspectives
This study is one of rare instances where the core methodological value of sociologists - collecting their own data, also in unfriendly circumstances where people and activities become hard to document - is relevant for economic research.
Prof. Stef Adriaenssens
KU Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Calculating Value Added of Prostitution with Multiple Data: A New Approach for Belgium, Public Finance Review, November 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1091142117734173.
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