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Introduction
The term “gig economy” is of recent origin. It was first recorded in the wake of the great financial crisis as workers who had been made unemployed during the recession scrambled to assemble portfolios of jobs that were typically part-time and of short duration. The development of internet platforms to facilitate such engagements has meant that many workers now gain employment of this kind. Particularly well known platforms include Uber, which serves as a market bringing together those wanting to hire and those willing to supply car journeys. The online platform offers considerable flexibility to suppliers, who are essentially self-employed. Consequently, the supportive structure provided by a long-term association between employer and employee is absent; many of the characteristics that define the institution of a “job” – such as continuity, progression and training and development – are absent too. In some sectors, such as journalism, freelancing has long been common, but the development of platforms such as Uber – or, in other contexts Upwork (services including IT freelancing), Deliveroo (food delivery) and TaskRabbit (odd jobs) – has resulted in a rapid increase in such activity[1]. These contexts have different implications in terms of their spatial dimension. Unlike taxi rides, IT work can be undertaken remotely. The spatial development of the gig economy is therefore unlikely to be even, and the emergence of new types of work may take different forms across space – be that travel-to-work areas or broader sub-national units such as regions. Yet, the spatial dimension of the gig economy has not been the subject of any analysis in the UK. This, specifically in the context of regions, is the subject of the present paper.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The next section provides a brief review of relevant literature. This is followed by a brief consideration of salient economic characteristics of the regions of the UK. Next comes a section on the data used in the present analysis. The results of a forecasting exercise are then reported. The paper ends with a discussion and conclusion.
Literature
The development of cloud computing has been crucial in enabling the development of digital platforms capable of bringing together buyers and sellers of services in a virtual environment, hence enabling the...