Italy To Factor Cocaine, Hookers Into GDP

This one’s for you, Charlie Sheen.

Italy’s National Institute of Statistics just announced that the country’s GDP will now include revenue generated from drug trafficking and prostitution.

New European Union rules now require the member nations to include all activities that produce income into their national growth domestic product estimates, regardless of their legality.

It’s going to be “very difficult for obvious reason that these illegal activities are not reported,” the National Institute of Statistics said in a statement.

The Bank of Italy in 2012 estimated the value of the criminal economy at 10.9 per cent of GDP.

A year ago, the US treasury boasted a “boost” in GDP of about $500 billion by arbitrarily including “intangibles” to the components that make up GDP.

The so-called “grey economy” of “businesses that do not pay taxes is already calculated in Italy’s GDP and was estimated to be worth between 16.3 per cent and 17.5 per cent of the economy in 2008,” ABC reports.