The GIGSTATS project studied the online gig economy, which refers to work transacted fully digitally via websites and apps. The gig economy constitutes a new and rapidly growing form of non-standard work, which is already the main source of income for approximately 1% of the European labour force. However, existing economic statistics are in general prone to mismeasuring the value of digital activities because they are often not directly related to production, but to development, design, and marketing, whose value is harder to establish. In addition, it is not clear to what extent online workers choose to report their earnings to tax agencies, especially if the earnings are small.
In light of these complications, our team of Oxford-based researchers had developed the Online Labour Index (OLI), the first economic indicator to provide an online gig economy equivalent of conventional labour market statistics, as part of the ERC starting grant iLABOUR (grant no 639652, 2015-2020). The OLI data is produced by a novel computational system that collects hundreds of thousands of data points per day from major online labour platforms representing approximately 60% of the global market, using automated API requests and web scraping. The system is being used in a growing number of academic publications to study the economic and geographic impacts and growth of online freelance work. Moreover, the data has attracted significant interest from national statistical agencies, policy makers, labour unions, think tanks, and international organisations struggling to measure new forms of work. For instance, the World Bank, OECD, and WTO have all used the data in their flagship publications, such as the 2019 World Development Report.
With the GIGSTATS project, our team has productised the OLI tool so that it scaled up to demand, remains available beyond the lifetime of the iLABOUR/GIGSTATS research project, and has a realistic and validated future development roadmap. By productising and up-scaling the OLI, we have been able to make significant progress on continuously tracking the development of the global online gig economy over time. For instance, our OLI data revealed that the online gig economy grew approximately 60% over the past 5 years - an average annual growth of 11%. We expanded the topical and geographical scope of the OLI to Russian- and Spanish-language online freelance markets and to measuring the participation of women in the online gig economy. Many researchers and international organizations, including the World Bank, the OECD, and the International Labour Organization (ILO), are now using the OLI data set in their activities and publications. Furthermore, we made significant advances in measuring the global online workforce and quantified the impact of the Covid-19 economic shock on online labour markets in collaboration with colleagues from the U.S.
With the help from the GIGSTATS ERC Grant, we were able to complete a successful technology transfer process, in which the International Labour Organization’s Research Department took over responsibility for maintaining and developing our OLI data collection system. This ensures that the OLI data will continue to be collected and made freely available to researchers and policy makers even after the conclusion of the iLabour project (see www.onlinelabourobservatory.org). We have also conducted other knowledge transfer activities with policy makers, including giving keynote presentations, and contributing to events and workshops organized by the EU Commission, OECD, UNDP, the World Bank, and the ILO.
