This WP focuses on how platform companies challenge the tax and social policies within EU-countries. It illustrates how such companies avoid the dominant practices, and how such companies are disciplined by social forces in the EU-setting. From this overview, the next step evaluates how the distribution of income and wealth in the EU changes over time. The goal is to assess how ‘inclusive’ wealth is generated by economic processes, and national welfare and tax policies. We investigate if previously clear-cut industrial social risks are blurred, and if social policy programs combatting these risks become obsolete. Some EU countries tried to solve the problems by tailoring more and more specific programs. This is investigated.

In this WP we will:

• Examine alternative proposals for how to ensure value created by platform economy firms is better captured by those that actually create the value on these platforms: users, employees and the wider public;
• Inspect trends in income inequalities between and within countries and between sectors of employment;
• Analyse the distribution of wealth in society. This means next to economic processes, also attention goes to social policy to support social needs. Within this context, analyse how countries tried to simplify their social policy and took steps towards basic income (of some kind);
• Evaluate possible gendering impacts of new approaches to social policy.

The outputs are needed for WP2, policy recommendations.

Tasks

1. Mapping value creation and extraction in the platform economy - We map out the business models of the platform economy (PE) firms, examine how they generate and extract value, and what the consequences are for the wider economy.
2. Fairer tax and benefits policies. By utilizing national and international (mainly OECD) tax statistics the WP scrutinizes how different EU countries tried to answer the dilemma how to collect revenues to finance the welfare state in digital and robotized economy. In other words, how and to what extent is it possible to replace decreasing social security contributions based on pay-roll taxes by taxes on robots and capital.
3. Benefits of universal basic income. This task carries out systematic comparisons of pros and cons of basic income models or models mimicking basic income, resulting in a refereed article.
4. Gender and inclusive policies. The task analyses national policies and developmental trends in social security programs (also basic income) and their possible gender effects. The analysis has 1. a dimension looking back in history and 2. a dimension looking at more recent trends and anticipating trajectories for future (including analysis with static and dynamic microsimulation models).

Contact person:
Olli Kangas at email olli.kangas@utu.fi

Leading partner:
Department of Social Research, University Of Turku, Finland

The rest of the partners:
Nederlandse Organisatie Voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek TNO, Netherlands
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), London, UK

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