ILO report: The role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work

Digital labour platforms have become a pervasive feature of contemporary society. They allow us to order food, arrange a ride, or buy remote freelancing services online. But how are they transforming the world of work? The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has just released its annual flagship report, which this year focuses on platforms. ILO researchers,… Read More »

Pandemic-proof jobs? IT freelancers in high demand, other online workers facing cuts

How are online labour markets reacting to the COVID-19 crisis? Does demand for online work diminish, as companies are facing declining revenues and reduce non-essential spending, or could the pandemic lock-down lead to additional demand for remote work? In one of our last iLabour blog posts, we briefly talked about these two opposite effects, as… Read More »

EU countries are rolling out systems to tax income from the platform economy

27 April 2020 0

Income earned through gig apps, freelancing platforms, letting platforms, and other digital intermediaries presents big challenges for taxation and social insurance. People should voluntarily report income from these sources to authorities, but in practice this doesn’t always happen. For instance, only 69 taxpayers reported income from Uber and Bolt in Estonia in 2016, even though… Read More »

The pandemic depresses online labour markets, but some countries are bouncing back – Insights from South Korea, Germany, and the United States

In our last iLabour blog post we looked at the response of online labour markets to the COVID-19 pandemic and realised that the downscaling effect might be dominating over the distancing effect: Demand for online work diminishes, as companies are facing declining revenues and reduce non-essential spending, including external contractors. The global demand for online… Read More »

The Exception to the Rule – Why Russia Demands more Online Jobs in Tech

In general, a striking feature of the geography of online labour utilisation is the similarity of occupational demand profiles of leading employer countries. The fact that national online labour demand profiles resemble each other suggests that demand largely comes from the same industry within each country: the information technology sector, generally speaking. However, there are… Read More »