The online gig economy's impact is not as big as many thought

Lee Branstetter

No PB22-9, Policy Briefs from Peterson Institute for International Economics

Abstract: The explosive global growth of online ride-hailing platforms raised concern (and, in some quarters, optimism) that similar growth in other platforms could rapidly disrupt traditional labor arrangements on a large scale in advanced economies. But the evidence to date suggests no significant changes in the overall importance of "gig" work in the US labor market nor a significant decline in the importance of traditional employment relationships. Online platforms may play a growing role (relative to traditional "brick-and-mortar" intermediaries) in connecting gig workers to their customers, but that alone does not guarantee a large increase in the importance of gig work. Branstetter reviews this evidence, noting the gaps in labor market data series that make the measurement of this phenomenon so difficult. Even if traditional employment relationships are not likely to decline significantly in the near future, the rise of online gig work nevertheless highlights longstanding inadequacies of labor market regulations, which recognize employees and truly independent contractors but struggle with the intermediate kinds of worker-firm relationships the online platforms enable. Branstetter summarizes proposals for regulating gig economy work and the lessons policymakers in South Korea and other economies can learn from the literature he reviews in this Policy Brief.

Date: 2022-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pay
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/on ... not-big-many-thought (text/html)

Related works:
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:iie:pbrief:pb22-9

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Briefs from Peterson Institute for International Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peterson Institute webmaster (webmaster@piie.com).