In 2014, the sharing economy was estimated at 14 billion dollars, and according to some estimates, by 2025 the number will grow to 335 billion dollars, according to “Investor”.
When BlaBlaCar started to work in Ukraine, most of our citizens began to actively use it. In fact, this service was a forerunner of the expansion of the sharing economy, its growing popularity, and demand for the ideas that it offers.
Sharing economy has many synonyms: the economy of division, the economy of common consumption, the network economy. In essence, it is an economic model based on the collective use of goods and services. In the economy, there are still two basic things – production and consumption, but between them there is communication. The sharing economy allows you to directly distribute products and services among consumers without the participation of intermediaries. Shared consumption suggests that it is more convenient to pay for temporary access to benefits than to own them.
To date, two factors explain the popularity of the sharing economy – technological and value factor. Technology now allows linking economic agents with the help of platform technologies. The developed software is able to directly link owners of apartments with a client without the intermediary. A farmer can go directly to a consumer.
Also, one can note the change of valuable landmarks. Previously, a sign of prosperity was a house, a car, a farm. Nowadays, a large number of people are betting on mobility without investing in property of this type. An important factor here is the fact that people stop wanting to “have”. The sharing economy allows you not to spend money on things or services that you rarely use and earn money in a similar way.
An important element of the business of sharing economy is trust. It is trust in user profiles that determines whether you can provide or receive a desired product or service. Accordingly, this type of economic relations builds a kind of horizontal chains of cooperation among users.
The sharing economy is in conflict with a common type of economy, and with a state. A state must develop methods and instruments for controlling the activity of similar economic activities. When it comes to a common economy, statistics show that the appearance of Airbnb (rental) service in Texas in 2008 caused a drop in prices for hotels somewhere around 6%. However, the fall in the price of housing attracts more tourists, and it is positive.
An important advantage of the sharing economy is that it teaches people to use common goods. This type of economy teaches individuals to pay attention to more global problems.
To sum up, the sharing economy is becoming a new trend, which at the same time revives the trust of people as one of the key factors of its existence is trust in each other. It should be noted that a development of the sharing economy will directly depend on the inclusion of the Ukrainian economy in the world economy.
Maybe, it is trust that will save the world.