I have been interested for a long time in prostitution and its social and economic roles. It’s a subject with great relevance across countries – to the tax base, safety of women, empowerment or disempowerment, ethics and culture, religion and morality, etc.
Moral discussion aside, workers (male and female) in the sex industry provide a service for which there is demand. Prostitution would not occur if there were no customers. If one includes self-employment within “entrepreneurship”, which some do, then this is an interesting and understudied area of research.
My personal interest in prostitution is how it relates to the longterm welfare and employment choices of women, and how policy can be designed against trafficking , sexual slavery and child prostitution. Reality (and history!) indicate that prostitution is not going to stop and it may be time to think about things like safety and disease control.
I’ll blog more on this later, and on some new research on prostitution. A great start is a paper by Steve Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh on street-level prostitution in Chicago (see here). Two important findings: (1) “Condoms are used only one-fourth of the time and the price premium for unprotected sex is small”; and (2) “A prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police office than to get officially arrested by one”.
Additionally, there are some interesting organizational and management elements to prostitution as well, like the relationship between pimps and prostitutes.
In the meantime, check out (here) what the State Tax Authority APEH has done in Hungary, where entrepreneur permits can be issued to commerical sex workers, in order to attract the more than 20,000 people and equivalent of 717.13 million Euro lost in the underground sex industry. Talk about a tax base!
