Posts tagged: microwork

Where are online workers located? The international division of digital gig work

The Internet has created a global market for digitally delivered freelance work, which is currently growing rapidly. Our new Online Labour Index worker supplement reveals what skills different countries are bringing to the market. For instance, the top occupational category in the United States is writing and translation, while in the Indian subcontinent it is… Read More »

Measuring the supply of digital labour: How the OLI worker supplement is constructed

As more and more tasks and projects are transacted via online platforms and apps, national governments and statistical agencies face increasing challenges in tracking the growth of this phenomenon. To address this, we have created the Online Labour Index (OLI) and its new Worker Supplement. This post explains the methodology behind the OLI Worker Supplement.… Read More »

The online gig economy grew 26% over the past year

Online freelancing and crowdwork are some of the terms used for temporary and project-based work conducted remotely over digital platforms. Unlike the local gig economy of driving and delivery work, this online gig economy often requires specialized skills such as programming and graphic design. Conventional economic indicators are poor at measuring this new market, so… Read More »

Mapping the demand for online labour

27 October 2016 0

Our colleagues over at the Geonet project have drawn some wonderful maps based on our Online Labour Index country data. The open vacancies are plotted in the figure below. As you can see the distribution is extremely skewed, with the United States buying as much online labour as the whole world combined. One explanation behind this is… Read More »

How is online work classified in the OLI?

21 September 2016 0

The Online Labour Index  is an index measuring the changes in the volume of projects transacted in major online platforms. As a part of OLI, we also report a breakdown across different occupations. In this post I will discuss how the occupation classification used in the OLI is constructed. In order to classify the work done… Read More »