Digital platform employment (DPE)
Why are these statistics needed?
Digital platform employment (DPE) refers to work done for pay or profit, organised in tasks or activities, which is managed through an internet platform or a phone application. This type of work, mediated by online platforms, represents a new form of work. To measure this emerging phenomenon, statistics on its prevalence, its characteristics, and their impact on workers' lives are required.
The experimental DPE statistics provide information about persons who perform work using digital platforms, namely about their sex, age, education level, DPE activity type, employment status, and work arrangements. This information is very valuable and useful to build informed policies aimed to develop DPE opportunities while securing workers' rights.
Why are they experimental?
Data measuring employment intermediated through internet-based platforms or applications are experimental because they come from a pilot data collection in the frame of the European labour force survey (EU-LFS). The pilot study was designed to evaluate and refine the
- research methodology
- questionnaire design
- data collection procedures
- overall feasibility of a full-scale survey as an ad-hoc subject of the EU-LFS.
In addition, data are considered experimental because just 17 countries conducted the pilot survey on a voluntary basis using a smaller scale sample than the usual EU-LFS sample.
How are they produced?
The pilot data collection was carried out in 2022 by 16 EU countries as well as 1 country of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). The EU-LFS questionnaire was complemented with an additional set of questions studied to detect paid work managed through an internet platform or a phone application. Respondents were randomly sampled from the resident population of each country.
For further details, please consult our methodological note.
Access to the statistics
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Feedback
To help Eurostat improve these experimental statistics, users and researchers are kindly invited to give us their feedback by email:
- What do you use the statistics on digital platform employment for?
- How useful would it be for the publication to provide detailed data on all EU countries?
- Would you have any comments or suggestions for improving the pilot methodology?
- What sort of analysis based on statistics on digital platform employment would bring added value in your field?