Ireland to include prostitution, drugs, and smuggled cigarettes in GDP

Illegal activities, including prostitution, drugs, and smuggled cigarettes were worth more than €1.25bn to the Irish economy last year, boosting official GDP figures.

While many countries have been including estimates for these banned activities for years, this is the first time Ireland has included them — at the behest of the EU and the UN — to conform to a new method of calculating countries’ wealth globally.

The CSO calculated that illegal economic activities amounted to 0.72% of the country’s GDP last year — similar to Britain’s. Germany and France both put theirs at around 3%, Italy at 2.4% and Spain at 1%. However, while the money circulates in the economy, it does not benefit the State in the form of tax.