This TED Talk features digital markets expert Amand Danani, recorded live at TED at BCG 2019.

In February 2013, my wife and I moved to Singapore. Exactly at the same time, Uber has announced it started operations in the country. Now, my wife and I agree on a lot of things, but using Uber was definitely not one of them.

While I was excited about the technology and how maybe we don't need to own cars anymore,

she felt that every Uber car is here to steal jobs from taxi drivers.

And Sarah was not the only one.

As the Uber's, Airbnbs, and Amazon's of the world, what we call online marketplaces,

as they started expanding their presence, we have heard all of us,

countless policymakers,

worried about how to deal with these new risks

of job destruction, lower wages, and tax leakage.

We've also heard company leaders

worried about aggressive competition

from global platforms eating up their local businesses.

And on the rational level, of course I understand.

After all, this is basic supply and demand economics.

If in any market you dramatically increase supply,

you should expect prices, profitability, and growth to go down for existing players.

But in my personal experience, I've also seen the other side of the story, where online

marketplaces like Gojek in Indonesia or Jumia in Africa have helped their business

ecosystems and the communities around them. The positive side I have seen demonstrated itself in a woman, a taxi driver in Egypt,

that now had the opportunity to work without the harassment she faced in the taxi business.

It demonstrated itself through a village in Kenya that got an economic boost

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