Sharing economy: main factors for growth

Abstract

The new phenomenon named the "sharing economy" emerged a decade ago and attracted scientists, businesses, and governments attention. Sharing economy offers new opportunities for innovative start-ups, improves resource conservation and efficiency of utilization, reformats consumption patterns, raises the spirit of entrepreneurship and responsibility of every capital owner, and improves social trust among people worldwide. Sharing economy contributes to job creation and promote sustainable growth. The European Commission acknowledges the benefits of the sharing economy and states that European countries should be open to new opportunities that sharing economy brings. However, despite the focus of researchers on the sharing economy, there is still a lack of deeper analysis and evaluation of the factors impacting the development of the sharing economy. Therefore, the paper aims to identify the main factors influencing the growth of sharing economy and compare the development processes of sharing economy in 25 EU countries and the United Kingdom. The author identified the essential factors and formed a sharing economy index based on the scientific literature analysis. For research purposes, multicriteria method AHP was used and recently developed method FARE-M was employed to calculate the weight of indicators. The research reveals that the most significant factors for sharing economy growth are economic and technological. Furthermore, the results reveal that the environment is more favourable for sharing economy growth in Luxembourg, Denmark and Netherlands.