The Timbro Sharing Economy Index is the first global index of the sharing economy. The index has been compiled using traffic volume data and scraped data, and provides a unique insight into the driving factors behind the peer-to-peer economy.
Monthly traffic data was collected for 286 services in 213 countries. For 23 of the 286 services, a complete count of active suppliers was done using automated “web scraping” techniques. Previous cross-country reports have employed surveys or self-reported indicators and have thus relied on conflicting colloquial definitions of the sharing economy.
To overcome this problem, we have developed a definition of the sharing economy that allows for exact classification of the services. This allows us to use traffic data and scraped usage-data without fuzziness about whether it is about a sharing economy service, or not. Using the definition, we have considered 4,651 service candidates worldwide, 286 of which were classified as sharing economy services. Note that the fact that but 10% of the candidates qualify as sharing economy services with our definition says more about how broadly we considered candidate organizations rather than it being exceedingly narrow.
