The economics of sex work is understudied: less than 5% of the 18,232 academic publications on the industry produced between 2000 and 2024 took an economic or business view, according to Stef Adriaenssens of KU Leuven. By comparison, 40% concerned biology or medicine.
Porn alone is thought to generate almost $100bn in revenues a year worldwide. OnlyFans, a subscription site known for X-rated content, hosts 4.6m creators, has 380m users and facilitates over $7bn a year in spending. UNAIDS estimates the share of women aged 15 and over engaged in "exchange of sexual services" at 0.6% worldwide, rising to 1.3% in sub-Saharan Africa.
Belgium granted sex workers full employment protections in 2024. Italy brought prostitution into the tax net in 2025. In Sweden, 8% of girls aged 15-19 say they have sent explicit content or arranged to meet someone for sex in exchange for money. On July 1st 2025 Sweden introduced rules meaning anyone paying for custom images or videos on porn sites could face up to a year in prison.
Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Manisha Shah of the University of California, Berkeley, used a Rhode Island judge's surprise decision to decriminalise indoor sex work and found it led to a drop in both violent crime and female gonorrhoea cases. Ms Shah and co-authors later studied a district in East Java, Indonesia, that unexpectedly criminalised sex work: sexually transmitted infections among sex workers rose, while women pushed out of the trade struggled to pay their children's school expenses.
Researchers at KU Leuven, including Adriaenssens, analysed more than 24,000 reviews posted on hookers.nl, a popular Dutch online marketplace, to estimate the share of women aged 15-49 engaged in sex work in the Netherlands and northern Belgium at 0.15% and 0.18%, respectively.
Only 56% of Britons aged 18-25 regard "sugaring"—when a younger person dates an older one for material benefits—as sex work, compared with 70% of over-65s. Platforms such as OnlyFans are lowering barriers to entry. Italian economists Elias Carroni, Davide Dragone and Marina Della Giusta have predicted that "digital sex" reduces the social and psychological cost of selling sex, as abundance erodes stigma, and may contribute to faster declines in fertility rates.
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