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Over the past ten years, the platform economy has become a topic of great interest in Europe. It has been cited as a force for economic growth and innovation, lower-cost goods and services, and low-barrier employment opportunities. At the same time, platforms have been criticised for potentially expanding the number of workers in precarious jobs. Thus, stakeholders - including policymakers, social partners, workers and platforms - have sought to better understand the platform economy, as evidenced by the growing body of literature surrounding platform issues.

This paper applies a new method to estimate the size of the crowd employment platforms in terms of revenue and the number of active workers. These platforms intermediate what [European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions] Eurofound calls crowd employment: an employment form that uses an online platform to enable organisations or individuals to access an indefinite and unknown group of other organisations or individuals to solve specific problems or to provide specific services or products in exchange for payments. Therefore, this study only attempts to estimate the size of the platform economy based on platforms with a significant element of paid labour. This paper utilises a triangulation approach to estimate the size of European crowd employment, finding that EU crowd employment platforms represented around €4.5 billion in gross revenue and 12.8 million active workers in 2016.

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The financial and economic crisis shattered the Lisbon Strategy’s attempt to increase the [European Union’s] EU’s employment rate to 70 per cent among 15-64 year olds by 2010. The new Europe 2020 strategy envisages a 75 per cent adult employment rate by 2020; however, this goal also seems unrealistic in light of the economic crisis which has caused the EU’s employment rate to drop significantly below 70 per cent. A crucial question now is whether a skill upgrade of the European labour force would help to increase the employment rate, especially among youth. This forum explores the relationship between education and employment throughout the EU.

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