Research papers

The rhetoric of the e-commerce opportunity in policy dialogues on trade and development often fails to engage with concerns on equity and inclusion. While the pandemic has given a new impetus to digital trade, the status quo of data extractivism presents an insurmountable barrier to gender-inclusive economic recovery. A new gender…

Parminder Jeet Singh, Anita Gurumurthy, and Nandini Chami contributed a chapter on Open Institutions and Their “Relevant Publics”: A Democratic Alternative to Neoliberal Openness to the book Critical Perspectives on Open Development: Empirical Interrogation of Theory Construction, published by IDRC.

Over the last ten years, “open”…

IT for Change’s research – as part of our project Recognize, Resist, Remedy – has demonstrated a need for legal-institutional reform to combat sexist hate online. There is also a global acknowledgement today, such as from the Council of Europe and the EU, that sexist hate speech online needs to be addressed by the law. In India, the 273rd Law…

The report is a critical review of IFC investments in EdTech with recommendations to IFC, Union and state governments and civil society on EdTech funding, policy and program.

EdTech 1 in India got funding of 3.8 billion from venture capitalists in 2021 and has a future valuation of USD 30 billion. Accordingly, this…

This paper discusses how the platform economy – dominated by a few firms – is extractivist, exploitative and expedient. It is based on an unsustainable model with scant regard for natural resources, and is built on the back of a global division of labor that bears the marks of race, class, gender, and geography. The paper emphasizes the…

This research details how Indonesians working in the tourism sector are included or excluded from the travel platform economy. It investigates why these actors are choosing to use travel platforms and how they express the benefits and constraints in this context. Inclusion in the platform economy involves understanding and addressing structures…

In recent years, the Philippines has seen a trend of platformization in domestic and care work through small-scale digital platforms that offer on-demand cleaning services. The nascent and informal nature of this system has given rise to new modes of employment and labor relationships that do not conform with the traditional models of domestic…

This paper examines the influence of digital platforms on Chinese workers across two booming on-demand service industries: ride-hailing and food-delivery. Though digital platforms have attracted considerable scholarly and legal attention in the past few years, this project is among one of the first to center on worker’s experience, and through…

This research project investigates the institutional, policy and operational dynamics of ride-hailing platforms in South Africa. A limited number of studies on platform economies in African nations have been conducted from business and economics perspectives that often do not focus on issues of inequality, poverty, economic inclusion and social…

This report was produced as part of the research project ‘Policy frameworks for digital platforms - Moving from openness to inclusion’.The report provides evidence from the Nigerian context to complement the global debate on designing appropriate regulatory frameworks for platforms that ensure accountability of platform providers to the…