Digitalisation of the economy and its impact on labour markets —

Christophe Degryse
have been overthrown <strong>and</strong> transformed. The changes in question affect services
<strong>and</strong> industry, manual <strong>and</strong> intellectual labour, salaried workers <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> selfemployed.
1.1 A new world <strong>economy</strong>?
In a sort <strong>of</strong> recent combination <strong>of</strong> new industrial revolution <strong>and</strong> gold rush,
innumerable young firms have been rushing in to develop applications
designed to monetise <strong>the</strong> new areas <strong>of</strong> potential opened up by <strong>the</strong>se trends. In
<strong>the</strong> areas <strong>of</strong> transport, delivery, accommodation, financing, repairs (plumbing,
electricity, etc.), hiring services, <strong>and</strong> so forth, new initiatives are seeing <strong>the</strong> light
every day.
According to Christine Balagué, vice-president <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> French Conseil national
du numérique (Le Monde, 23/08/2015), any individual equipped with a mobile
phone can now ‘become a producer, create services, or at least place services on
<strong>of</strong>fer’ for <strong>the</strong> purpose <strong>of</strong> earning a little spare cash, making it through to <strong>the</strong> next
salary payment, or topping up <strong>the</strong>ir benef<strong>its</strong>. In parallel, ownership that
previously seemed to confer entitlement to <strong>the</strong> exclusively private <strong>and</strong> part-time
use <strong>of</strong> an expensive asset (car, apartment, tools, etc.) has come to represent for
<strong>the</strong> owner a capital that can be exploited in a number <strong>of</strong> different ways for <strong>the</strong>
purpose <strong>of</strong> generating income. This sudden transformation gives rise to
numerous questions about <strong>the</strong> ‘person/worker’ but also <strong>the</strong> ‘platform/employer’,
about <strong>the</strong> location <strong>of</strong> pr<strong>of</strong><strong>its</strong> (<strong>and</strong> <strong>of</strong> taxes), about monopoly <strong>and</strong> competition,
about financing <strong>and</strong> social models, about l<strong>and</strong> use <strong>and</strong> development, about
individual <strong>and</strong> collective responsibilities, etc.
The phenomenon is in essence international <strong>and</strong> reflects social inequalities
with, on <strong>the</strong> one h<strong>and</strong>, <strong>the</strong> unemployed or precarious worker who will seek to
top up meagre wages or benef<strong>its</strong> by <strong>of</strong>fering to work for Uber <strong>and</strong>, on <strong>the</strong> o<strong>the</strong>r,
<strong>the</strong> dynamic executive who will arrange for a personal assistant in India to
manage his accounts <strong>and</strong> his appointments diary. While this image may be a
caricature, it illustrates <strong>the</strong> two ends <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> chain whose links are <strong>the</strong> three
components <strong>of</strong> internet, Big Data <strong>and</strong> smartphone.
These three components have today come to form <strong>the</strong> underpinnings <strong>of</strong> a new
<strong>economy</strong> <strong>and</strong>, hence, <strong>of</strong> a new world labour market 1 . The accompanying
discourse used to describe this emerging reality is still very tentative: digital,
collaborative, sharing, on-dem<strong>and</strong> <strong>economy</strong>… It is interesting to observe that
this new <strong>economy</strong> ‘has been undetected in statistics for <strong>the</strong> most part, largely
because <strong>the</strong> economics <strong>of</strong> 21 st century digital technology is quite different from
previous technologies that have <strong>impact</strong>ed <strong>the</strong> labor market at a broad scale.
1. In <strong>the</strong> framework <strong>of</strong> this limited study we will not deal with o<strong>the</strong>r aspects <strong>of</strong> ‘disruptive’
technologies such as genomics, advanced materials, 3D printing, etc. for which we refer <strong>the</strong>
reader to, in particular, McKinsey Global Institute : ‘Disruptive technologies : Advances that
will transform life, business, <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> global <strong>economy</strong>’ (Manyika et al. 2013).
8 WP 2016.02