3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
3.3 Codify a right of disconnection in labor law: Mobile devices have given rise to permanent
accessibility. A guaranteed disconnection right would avoid employees needing to be
available even outside working hours and prevent a communication overload.
4 Public Policy
4.1 Set up Sharing Economy Commissioner. The Sharing Economy is an integral dimension of
the overall economy. A core aspect of the Sharing Economy is its capacity of extracting
more value from an economy’s myriad assets, resulting in raising their aggregate efficiency
and productivity and reducing their marginal cost and ecological footprint. Sharing cities,
regions, and nations require public authorities to play leadership roles. It is essential to
scale up a public commitment to the Sharing Economy vision, supported by all levels of
government from city to national, as well as the business community, and the civil society,
and backed up by the appropriate government regulations and sufficient startup capital. A
new Commissioner of Prosumer/Sharing economy will take a leading role in marshaling
locally supported initiatives designed to create sharing activities available for all the
citizenry. Features of this Ministry include the build-out of the infrastructure essential for
physical and digital sharing, providing Sharing Economy start-up and scale-up enterprises
with incubation and support centers, and harnessing unused and underused public
resources. The Commissioner will be tasked with the mission of developing appropriate
regulations and indicators for the development and expansion of the Sharing Economy in
Luxembourg. At the same time, issues raised by citizens about the prosumer/Sharing
Economy need addressing. Big Data is one major issue and will even become more
important over time, and opportunities and risks must be broached. These include
property rights on generated data, data protection, privacy and surveillance. Another
concern to monitor is the possible concentration of data in the hands of a few big
operators, and what consequences could result from this situation, and which proposed
actions should be developed.
4.2 The new Sharing Economy Commissioner (see 4.1 proposal) should undertake a review
and evaluation of the prospect to systematically provide an individual VAT number or an
entry in the register of commerce and companies to each citizen or resident. With this
measure, everyone would be acknowledged as a potential social entrepreneur and
prosumer. The VAT should be attached to the person, not to a specific activity, to allow
dynamic prosumption, meaning the social entrepreneur could practice simultaneously or
over time different activities under the same VAT number. A complementary simplification
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