The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade

4 Introductionglobal market in women, at home and abroad, in highly organizedtrafficking and in the most diffused, informal arrangements’ (ibid.).A 1998 International Labour Organization (ILO) report suppliespowerful evidence to suggest that prostitution was organized on aquite new scale and integrated into national economies in significantways in the 1990s. As Lin Leam Lim comments:Prostitution has changed recently in some SE Asian countries.The scale of prostitution has been enlarged to an extentwhere we can justifiably speak of a commercial sex sectorthat is integrated into the economic, social and political lifeof these countries. The sex business has assumed the dimensionsof an industry and has directly or indirectly contributedin no small measure to employment, national income andeconomic growth.(Lim, 1998, p. vi)The report is broadly positive about this development as good forthe economies of these countries, arguing that prostitution should berecognized as legitimate by governments because of its profitability,even if they do not go so far as to legalize it.Prostitution is now a significant market sector within nationaleconomies, though the worth of domestic sex industries is hardto estimate, considering the size of the illegal industry and thegeneral lack of transparency that surrounds it. The industry ofprostitution is most developed and entrenched in those countriesin which militaries such as the US and Japan in the 1930s and1940s set up prostitution systems on a scale and with a precisionwhich is industrial, such as Korea, the Philippines and Thailand(Moon, 1997; Tanaka, 2002). The ILO report estimated that thesex industry accounts for 2–14 per cent of the worth of economiesin the four countries studied, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailandand Indonesia (ibid.). The Korean government estimated in 2002that one million women were in prostitution at any one time inthe country (Hurt, 2005). The industry was estimated to be worth4.4 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), more than forestry,fishing and agriculture combined (4.1 per cent). This was said tobe a conservative estimate since many forms of prostitution wereuntrackable. It was estimated that between 1 in 6 and 1 in 10 ofwomen in the country have worked in some capacity in prostitution(ibid.). The sex industry in the Netherlands, which legalized brothel