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THE RISE of

GIG ECONOMY

NATURE, OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES

The digital technology revolution has

While most of the developing economies embrace enabled the gig economy which is
industry 4.0, the mainstream economies are in a
paradigm shift from industry 4.0 to industry 5.0, driven by platform organizations that
where technology and sustainability will be the connect global clients and gig
core drivers of human progress. The fundamental
changes associated with the above transformation workers. The gig economy is
call for inevitable changes in almost everything attractive for actors due to multiple
that we do. More and more people worldwide
focus on ‘access’ instead of ‘ownership’ and reasons despite some of the
‘service’ instead of ‘owning employee time’. The criticisms against it. Being a
conventional boundaries of working, such as fixed
time, working for a single employer, and working developing country, can Sri Lanka be
in a specific geographical place, are blurring.
Working arrangements are becoming short term, able to reap the potential benefits of
technology-driven, and flexible despite various the gig economy?
cultural, social, and economic identities in local
cultures and economies. Simply, geared by the
advancements of mobile technologies, cloud com-
puting, blockchain technology, artificial intelli-
gence, big data, various other technologies, and
the heightened concern on sustainability, the
economic model is transforming from the conven-
tional model to a ‘gig economy’. A gig is a task
(AppJobs, 2020) or a short-term work arrange-
ment (Duszyński, 2020). The gig economy is a
free market system where organizations (clients)
and independent service providers/workers
engage in short term work arrangements (Dusz-
yński, 2020). The gig economy is alternatively
coined as ‘sharing economy’, ‘collaborative econ-
omy’, ‘on-demand economy’, ‘platform econo-
my’, ‘human cloud economy’, and ‘contingent
economy’(AppJobs, 2020). In this background,
this article shows the nature of the gig economy in
terms of its growth, how the gig economy
operates, the attractions and criticisms of the gig
economy from the actor’s perspective, and dis-
cusses the opportunities and challenges of the gig
economy for Sri Lanka.