Abstract
ABSTRACT The digital economy has led to significant socio-economic transformations in all aspects of our society and livelihoods. While there is a growing literature on the effect of digital platforms on development, none consolidates the available evidence from a development perspective. In this systematic literature review, we grouped the available literature into three main themes and critically synthesize and analyse the role of digital technology and digital platforms on the development of the modern economy. To enable the inclusion of a wide array of published papers, we allowed for relevant quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studies globally. This approach allows us to reflect on the role of digital platforms for development more broadly as well as discuss opportunities for future research.
Highlights
The rapid digital technological change has revolutionized the modern economy and all facets of life
We further explored the effect of Digital platforms (DPs) on these three aspects of economic development and how policy can leverage the positive effects of DPs to improve the well-being of citizens
There is a rapidly growing multidisciplinary research examining the effect of the platform economy on different dimensions of development
Summary
The rapid digital technological change has revolutionized the modern economy and all facets of life. The platform economy has become global and dominant with some of the most successful and valuable firms, in terms of market value (Saberian et al 2020; Kiesling 2020; Nooren et al 2018). These include Airbnb in the hospitality industry; Uber, Bolt, BlaBlaCar, and Lift in the transport sector; Uber Eats and Deliveroo in the food delivery industry; Facebook and WhatsApp in the communication industry; Netflix, YouTube, and Tiktok in the entertainment industry.. Digital platforms (DPs) are the main drivers of the platform economy (Gössling and Michael Hall 2019) and are fundamental to the digital transformation (Idowu and Elbanna 2020; Kiesling 2020).. Digital platforms (DPs) are the main drivers of the platform economy (Gössling and Michael Hall 2019) and are fundamental to the digital transformation (Idowu and Elbanna 2020; Kiesling 2020). Given the proliferation of the internet and the widespread diffusion of mobile phones, DPs are ubiquitous and have transformed how we: engage and share experiences (Facebook, WhatsApp), move around (Uber, Bolt, Lift); buy Johannesburg, South Africa
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