No, Big Data firm, the UK isn't teeming with UBER-FRISKY GIGOLOS

240 million trembling knees

At 50 quid a go 6 billion is 120 million knee tremblers a year and ladies of the night would be earning 100K a year. Maybe I should be thinking about buying a Cadillac convertible and a fur coat.

Perhaps hairdressers could throw out the sun bed in the back room, paint it red and install a nice round divan.

That's not the reason you're looking for

The EU in its infinite wisdom wants drugs and prostitution added to the GDP figures because it's legal in some places and not in others and that means things aren't harmonised.

So they add estimations to the GDP where necessary to get nice harmonised figures.

The estimations are arrived at differently in each country anyway and are in all probability extremely generous.

So things still aren't harmonised.

It's not about harmonisation, it's about putting lipstick on the pig that is the EU economies.

This looks like an extremely long-winded way of saying 'garbage in, garbage out'.

which won't be news to anyone in computer programming.

A pedant writes ...

we're reasonably sure that gay demand for paid sex is only about 10 per cent higher than heterosexual. In the sense that if one per cent of men (usually what it's pegged at) are users or hirers of female companions, then 11 per cent or so of gay men are.

Wouldn't that make the demand 11x higher, not 10%?

It all makes work...

Many years ago a song was released that described how the gas man broke the water pipe, which fused the electricity, which scorched the plaster, which fell into the water pipe and blocked it. Or something like that. The chorus line was, "It all makes work for the working man to do".

I have been waiting ever since for the song, "It all makes work for the working girl to do".

While I understand your point, the impact on the GDP numbers caused by the changes in accounting for R&D that were brought it at the same time is both much greater and far more misleading.

And military 'invetsment'

Perhaps that legion of blokes offering aren't meeting with quite the level of success as the sheilas? Certainly I could try offering my special services for £50 a pop but I suspect my first prospective customer would say that's about £100 too much...

25 encounters a week

Seriously? I can't say for the guy on guy stuff, but for my encounters with the fair sex when i were younger....25 a week was a warmup.

There is another way to make the numbers fit.

All the numbers would add up if we binned the un-referenced estimate of 1-3% of the male population being homosexual or bisexual. If the real number is an order of magnitude higher, suddenly the rest fits.

Given the likelihood in our society that men will massively underreport homosexual or bisexual tendencies, I would find it completely unsurprising if there were a vastly larger number of homosexuals and bisexuals than any survey, no matter how anonymous, would find. People lie. People screw other people and lie about it.

If, say, 30% of men are homosexual and/or bisexual, then the numbers add up.

Is there any reason why this possibility wasn't even considered?

It's the 21st century. Surely we have moved beyond the idea that homosexuality is rare and aberrant behaviour?

MSM v gay

So, the term "Men who have Sex with Men" is preferred rather than homosexual or gay within the medical community; this is not political correctness gone mad but a description of risk behaviour rather than a personally assigned sexual orientation. MSM are significantly more common than gay men - and not just in prison or the navy, 2 environments where it is well known MSM does not equate to gay.

I agree with the main thrust (ooo err) of the article though - it is unlikely that male prostitutes earn anything like as much as female on a pro rata basis.