CJEU - Recent Developments in Value Added Tax 2022

S. 67VAT Treatment of Sharing and Gig Economy within the EU

Nevia Čičin-Šain

S. 681. Introduction

The sharing and gig economy is a type of economy in which persons make use of their idle assets, skills, or simply time facilitated by online platforms in order to make additional income. This trend began to appear at the end of the 2000s at approximately the time of the Great Recession possibly as a call for an increased sharing of resources instead of their exceeding concentration in the hands of a minority. However, in the past years, the sharing economy began to show progressively fewer elements of this initial trend of “communalization of things”, increasingly gaining a commercial dimension. This is witnessed by the fact that more and more individuals and businesses are joining it in order to make such an activity the source of their additional or even primary income. Indeed, there is a diminishing number of “collaborative companies” that are truly “collaborative”, making some authors request to retire the word “sharing” and to rename this type of economy a “leveraged economy”. The suppliers (drivers, hosts, independent contractors) leverage their assets, time, and skills to make money. Users ...