This policy brief examines the issues raised by the emergence of huge companies such as Uber in the UK and Didi in China that operate in the so-called ‘sharing economy’. The business model of these companies represents a fundamental realignment of the relations between capital and labour, and raises questions about the liability for public safety, the need to preserve the jobs of traditional ‘offline’ operators, and the unfair use of consumers’ personal data.

The standard frameworks used to evaluate constitutional systems are not well suited to exposing transitional capacity. The constitutional problems that Minxin Pei’s Trapped in Transition focuses on do not reveal the system’s eventual capacity to transcend them.

An overview of a range of reflections by leading experts on Minxin Pei's thesis that China's transition has stalled.