The polarisation of remote work

Fabian Braesemann, Fabian Stephany, Ole Teutloff, Otto Kässi, Mark Graham and Vili Lehdonvirta

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has led to the rise of remote work with consequences for the global division of work. Remote work could connect labour markets, but it could also increase spatial polarisation. However, our understanding of the geographies of remote work is limited. Specifically, does remote work bring jobs to rural areas or is it concentrating in large cities, and how do skill requirements affect competition for jobs and wages? We use data from a fully remote labour market - an online labour platform - to show that remote work is polarised along three dimensions. First, countries are globally divided: North American, European, and South Asian remote workers attract most jobs, while many Global South countries participate only marginally. Secondly, remote jobs are pulled to urban regions; rural areas fall behind. Thirdly, remote work is polarised along the skill axis: workers with in-demand skills attract profitable jobs, while others face intense competition and obtain low wages. The findings suggest that remote work is shaped by agglomerative forces, which are deepening the gap between urban and rural areas. To make remote work an effective tool for rural development, it needs to be embedded in local skill-building and labour market programmes.

Keywords: Remote work; Online labour; Platform economy; Geography; Polarisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F16 F6 J24 J31 L14 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-isf, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/238189/1/B ... n-of-remote-work.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The polarisation of remote work (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:238189

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/q8a96

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().