British Facts

 As an example of the ridiculous factors behind these misleading Western GDP statistics, he pointed out some of the items that the British had chosen to include in their own GDP:

A side note, I also ran across some less wholesome facts when doing research on the subject. I refer to a Financial Times report just for a laugh. In 2014, UK started to include prostitution and illegal drugs in its GDP reporting to the tune of 10 billion pounds a year. This raised the reported UK GDP by 5% in an effort to help the government raise its debt ceiling.

To derive at this number, the statistics bureau had to make some assumptions: “The ONS breakdown estimates that each of the UK’s estimated 60,879 prostitutes took about 25 clients a week in 2009, at an average rate of £67.16. It also estimates that the UK had 38,000 heroin users, while sales of the drug amounted to £754m with a street price of £37 a gram.”

Thus, Western economists have adopted a bizarre framework in which rising crime levels contribute to the official economic measure of national prosperity.

From Unz. But Unz does not understand, that GDP measures "economic activity" and crime (what crime?) is economic activity par excellence.