The gig economy in Poland: evidence based on mobile big data

TL;DR

This study uses mobile big data to measure the growth and demographics of the gig economy in Poland, focusing on food delivery and transportation services from 2018 to 2020.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach using passive smartphone data to quantify the size and characteristics of the platform economy, offering an alternative to survey-based methods.

Findings

The platform economy in Poland is growing, especially in food delivery and transport.

Most gig workers are young men, with demographic differences across service types.

Foreign workers do not dominate the gig workforce in Poland.

Abstract

In this article we address the question of how to measure the size and characteristics of the platform economy. We propose a~different, to sample surveys, approach based on smartphone data, which are passively collected through programmatic systems as part of online marketing. In particular, in our study we focus on two types of services: food delivery (Bolt Courier, Takeaway, Glover, Wolt and transport services (Bolt Driver, Free Now, iTaxi and Uber). Our results show that the platform economy in Poland is growing. In particular, with respect to food delivery and transportation services performed by means of applications, we observed a growing trend between January 2018 and December 2020. Taking into account the demographic structure of apps users, our results confirm findings from past studies: the majority of platform workers are young men but the age structure of app users is different for each of the two categories of services. Another surprising finding is that foreigners do not account for the majority of gig workers in Poland. When the number of platform workers is compared with corresponding working populations, the estimated share of active app users accounts for about 0.5-2% of working populations in 9 largest Polish cities.