The Brits have figured out how to expand their economy – with drugs and sex – but France says non

An easy way to give GDP a leg-up…

Alf is keen to get back to Parliament where he will explain to Craig Foss his fiendish plan for lifting the country’s GDP.

Foss is our Minister of Statistics and the fiendish plan involves expanding the GDP data set.

It can be done by following the Brits, as we learn from this report in The Telegraph.

Britain has overtaken France to become the world’s fifth largest economy, new analysis shows.

A shake-up of the national accounts this summer, which showed the UK’s downturn during the Great Recession was shorter and shallower than previously thought, helped Britain overtake the Gallic economy by a whisker this year.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said Britain’s acceleration was also boosted by the inclusion of sex and drugs to UK growth.

Official estimates show prostitution added about £5.7bn to the UK economy in 2013, while illegal drugs were worth about £6.62bn.

The addition of prostitution and illegal drugs form part of new pan-European accounting standards.

The stroppy French have refused to comply with EU rules because they don’t consider them to be “voluntary commercial activities”.

Eric Dubois, a director at INSEE, France’s statistics office, has described drug use as a “dependency” that does not involve “free will”. He said prostitution was the result of “Mafia networks and trafficking illegal immigrants”.

Too bad.

UK gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to total $2.828 trillion (£1.816 trillion) this year, compared with French GDP of $2.827 trillion.

The CEBR expects Britain to pull further ahead of France in the coming years, despite concerns about the sustainability of the UK recovery raised after further data revisions this week.

The revisions showed growth in five out of the previous six quarters was weaker than thought.