London: Men who earn the most have the highest sex drives, according to an on-line survey from the UK’s BBC.

Over 250,000 men and women from 170 countries took part in the online survey for the BBC over the last ten months, in the world’s largest survey of sexual behaviour, it confirmed that power is indeed an aphrodisiac. The results are being aired in a UK TV programme tomorrow (Sunday) on BBC1 called Secret of the Sexes.

Professor John Manning, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancaster where the research was carried out commented: “There is a debate about whether differences arise because of the environment – society’s expectations – or whether they are also influenced by genes and hormones We wanted to see if these sex differences in behaviours went across large numbers of different human populations and many of them in the survey do.”

The survey asked more than 200 questions ranging from how high they rated their sex drive to how good they were at tasks such as map-reading. They were split into four salary groups – £10,000 a year and less, £10,000 to £25,000, £25,000 to £50,000 and above £50,000. The salaries were weighted according to which country the respondents were from.

They were asked to rate their sex drives on a scale of one to seven with one low and seven high.

In both genders sex drive increased gradually along with salary regardless of which country the respondent came from. But across the board, even the lowestearningmen had a higher sex drive than the best-paid women.

“You get the same increasing sex drive with increasing income whether you look at just the UK, the U.S., France or Ireland,’ said Professor Manning. ‘It might be that testosterone is the basis of these differences.”

Professor Manning said that high testosterone levels led to higher sex drive which in turn likely made men work harder.