Analysing the Sharing Economy...• Capturing sharing economy businesses in some of our established...
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Expert workshop CEPS Session 1: Size, development and taxonomy Measuring the sharing economy of the UK Pauline Beck Project lead of the Sharing Economy study, Office for National Statistics, UK
Transcript of Analysing the Sharing Economy...• Capturing sharing economy businesses in some of our established...
Expert workshop CEPS
Session 1: Size, development and taxonomy
Measuring the sharing economy of the
UK
Pauline Beck
Project lead of the Sharing Economy study, Office for National
Statistics, UK
Overview
• Our interest
• Sharing economy and the UK national accounts
• Challenges
• Our progress so far
• Summary and next steps
Our interest
Providing
transport
Offering
delivery
services
Renting
out a
vehicle
Selling crafts
/ buying to re-
sell
Renting
out
space
Performing
short-term
jobs
Investing /
lending
Sharing of under-
used assets through
completing peer-to-
peer transactions
that are only viable
through digital
intermediation,
allowing parties to
benefit from usage
outside of the
primary use of that
asset.”
Where is SE activity captured?
• Business surveys to obtain these data, such as the Annual Business Survey captures the turnover reported by sharing economy businesses
GDP production approach
• Household surveys: such as the Living Costs and Food Survey reports on household expenditures
GDP expenditure
approach
• Providers report the income through a business which they have established, or report this activity as personal income
GDP income approach
• Potential under-reporting:
• There is potential for under-reporting in all 3 of the
approaches
• Quality adjustments are made to account for this.
• Information from all 3 measures is utilised before
reaching a final balanced position and the headline GDP
statistics
• Consumer to consumer transactions
Sharing economy and the UK national
accounts
Our aim
• To produce standalone official statistics on the size of the
sharing economy in terms of:
• Value
• Impact on Labour Market
• Data will be used to inform policy making
• Data will also provide an indicator of how the UK sharing
economy compares internationally
• Defining the sharing economy
• Lack of agreed definition and terminology
• Identifying sharing economy businesses
• Collecting more information directly from these
businesses, as well as exploring techniques such as
web crawlers should enable us to identify further
platforms
Challenges
Challenges
• Understanding how sharing economy businesses
are structured and how their turnover is comprised
• Is their entire business part of the sharing economy?
• Is their turnover made up of other sources of revenue?
• We have a new ‘large cases unit’ which will look into
business profiling and understand business structure.
Challenges
• How to treat non-monetary transactions or ‘free
services’ in the sharing economy?
• Still of interest to ONS in order to better inform the debate around
economic well-being
• However still may be captured by the UK Household Satellite
Accounts which measure and value household activities that are not
included in the National Accounts (e.g. unpaid household labour)
Our progress: Definition & Decision tree
Figure 1: Decision tree for identifying sharing economy businesses
(source: ONS)
Our progress: Business Surveys
• Capturing sharing economy businesses in some of our established business
surveys, such as the Annual Business Survey, E-commerce Survey and
Financial Services Survey.
Figure 2: Comparison of e-commerce survey variables for sharing economy and non-sharing
economy businesses, (source: ONS)
Our progress: Social Surveys
• We had included new questions on the Internet Access Survey for households
and individuals. Harmonised questions across European Union (EU) member
states
Household surveys:
Exploring options of adding questions to:
• Labour Force Survey,
• Living Costs and Food Survey,
• Time Use Survey
Business surveys:
Tailoring our questionnaires for sharing economy businesses, is
an option
Next steps: Surveys
Next steps: Administrative data
• Conducting a review of administrative data sources which could
be used to collect information on the sharing economy
• Investigating sources such as:
• Self-assessment tax returns from Her Majesty’s Revenue
and Customs
• Administrative data directly from businesses’ accounts
• Positive discussions with some sharing economy businesses
and organisations such as the Sharing Economy UK Trade
Body (SEUK) regarding data access
Thank you for your time.
Do you have any questions?
