Tackling Undeclared Work in the Collaborative Economy and Bogus Self-Employment

Grey workers in the European Union: precariousness among economically dependent solo self-employed

“…Based on the probability to become dependent solo self-employed being lower in welfare-state countries, i.e. those with higher net social protection and LMP expenditure (Williams et al. , 2020), we hypothesize that Net social protection and LMP have negative effect on Disempowerment (H15a, H16a) and Vulnerability (H15b, H16b). Theme 8 – Prosperous business environment includes two country-level variables: “GDP per capita” and “Employment rate”.…”

“…In terms of effect of county-level, i.e. contextual variables on the phenomenon's prevalence, EWCS 2015 and EU-LFS 2017 datasets revealed the spread of dependent solo self-employment being negatively influenced by GDP per capita, rate of temporary employment, share of employment in the public sector and state government expenditure on both social protection and labor market policies (LMP) (Williams and Horodnic, 2019;Williams et al, 2020;Carrasco and Hernanz, 2021).…”

E-formalisation in Europe

“…On the one hand, and akin to other global regions (see ILO, 2021b), there is a burgeoning literature on how technologies have led to the creation of digital platforms (sometimes referred to as the "collaborative" or "sharing" economy) and that the resultant platform work has increased the prevalence of informality (Eurofound, 2018;Hauben et al, 2020;Heyes and Newsome, 2017;Williams and Horodnic, 2017c;Williams et al, 2020). Indeed, by late 2019, 10% of all undeclared work in the European Union was sourced through digital platforms (Williams and Horodnic, 2021).…”

Undeclared activities on digital labour platforms: an exploratory study

“…In most countries from Europe, platforms simply do not have to report data regarding the number/volume of transactions, and in countries where they have to, such data is rarely publicly available (Hauben et al, 2020). As a consequence of these aspects and also of the unclarity of regulations on digital work platforms (OECD, 2019), these platforms are thought to facilitate undeclared or under-declared transactions and work (and informal economy in general) (Williams, 2020;Nov akov a et al, 2020;Williams and Puts, 2019;Heyes and Newsome, 2017;Williams and Horodnic, 2016). For example, in a survey conducted by TNS Sofres in France, only 15% of participants said that they have declared their earnings from digital platforms (De Groen and Maselli, 2016).…”

“…However, in this paper, we will refer to platform work as to a term with a broader definition: the use of all specialized websites, online platforms and mobile applications to do activities aiming to generate income, these including both online selling platform work and labour-exchange platform work (Hoang et al, 2020). People doing platform work are hence involved in platform economy, which is often named in many forms in the scientific literature as collaborative economy Williams and Puts, 2019;Heyes and Newsome, 2017;De Groen and Maselli, 2016;Vaughan and Daverio, 2016), collaborative consumption (Ianole-Calin et al, 2020;Hamari et al, 2016), sharing economy (Heyes and Newsome, 2017;Schor and Attwood-Charles, 2017;De Groen and Maselli, 2016;Williams and Horodnic, 2016) and gig economy (Montgomery and Baglioni, 2020;Wood et al, 2019). To these terms, aiming to cover multiple alternative terms, Kov acs et al (2021) and Eurofound (2018) also add in their studies peer-to-peer economy, peer-to-peer based sharing or on-demand economy, but these terms are used more rarely.…”