By Peter Berton

LONDON – Established in 1843, The Economist magazine long has been a bastion of serious economic journalism. So when the May 25, 2013, issue printed a story headlined “Sex doesn’t sell – an old industry is in deep recession,” money-minded readers took note.

What kind of sex isn’t selling in the UK? Prostitution, The Economist replies.

“The days of being able to make a full-time living out of prostitution are long gone, reckons [sex worker] Vivienne, at least in larger towns and cities,” the article notes. “‘It’s stupidly competitive right now,’ she laments.”

Debbie, another sex worker, said she is only booking two to three “jobs” a day, compared to eight or nine a year ago.

“She has cut her prices,” The Economist reported, adding Debbie told the magazine, “‘If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t still be open.’”

Things are so bad for Debbie, in fact, “that she can now make more money doing up furniture and attending car-boot sales than she can turning tricks,” the magazine stated.

Why are Britain’s sex workers feeling the pinch, and not in a pleasant way? First, according to The Economist, UK consumer spending at the end of 2012 was almost 4 percent lower than at its peak in 2007. Since paying for sex is a luxury, potential clients are using their cash to cover the bills instead.

In response, Vivienne — a photographer who does sex work part-time to supplement her income — “is offering discounts out of desperation, reckoning it is better to reduce prices by £20 than to have no customers at all,” The Economist noted. “Another woman says that some punters are just as anxious to talk about the difficult job market as they are to have sex.”

The second factor hurting the sex-work sector is supply and demand, the magazine posited: As regular jobs become scarce, “More people are entering prostitution, agrees Cari Mitchell of the English Collective of Prostitutes. Some working women in Westminster say they have halved their prices because the market has become so saturated. In London, and increasingly elsewhere, immigrants provide strong competition. But Sophie, an expensive escort in Edinburgh, says she is seeing an influx of newbies, including students and the recently laid-off, many of them offering more for less.

“On the streets, where prices are lowest and life is harshest, things are more desperate,” the article continues. “Georgina Perry, the service manager for Open Doors, [a National Health Services] centre in east London that offers health services to sex workers, says that in the past few years some former prostitutes who had found low-paid work, for example as cleaners, have returned to the sex trade as other jobs have become harder to find. The women are back on the streets, charging £20, at most.”

The article did contain a bit of encouraging news, though: Top-end escorts apparently are not losing customers, perhaps reflecting the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent continue to thrive while the 99 percent struggle.

“The market for dominatrices is holding up well, too,” The Economist reported.