Prostitution: 4% of Korean GDP

Interesting article. This article was written after the crackdown on prositution, right after one of the government economic think tanks said the crackdown might cause a drop of 1% in GDP next year.

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2004/10/seoul_nights.html
Some of the article is reproduced below:

in the wake of the Korean government’s publishing of statistics showing that prostitution made up 4.1% of South Korea’s GDP. (The Korean YMCA estimates that the actual number may in fact be higher – at around 5%.) To look at this another way, the industries of forestry, agriculture, and fishing COMBINED add up to 4.4% of the GDP.

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