Taxation planning policies in the meal-sharing economy: a futurist approach

The meal-sharing economy, a growing subset of the digital sharing economy, enables individuals to monetize home-cooked meals through peer-to-peer platforms. While often grouped with ride-sharing or home-sharing, meal-sharing presents distinct regulatory and taxation challenges due to its informality, direct food handling, and experiential nature. Existing tax policies lag these emerging dynamics, resulting in opaque compliance, jurisdictional uncertainty, and inequitable enforcement. This study adopts a futurist approach to examine planning taxation within the meal-sharing economy, addressing regulatory shortcomings intensified by technological disruption and informal economic activity. Drawing on comparative case studies of platforms such as Eatwith, Uber Eats, and Airbnb Experiences, and informed by lessons from ride-sharing and home-sharing taxation models, this research identifies three core challenges: (1) difficulties in tracking informal income, (2) jurisdictional ambiguities in cross-border digital transactions, and (3) the absence of sector-specific tax frameworks. The study contributes to the literature by integrating Optimal Tax Theory (OTT), Tax Compliance Theory (TCT), and Platform Governance Theory (PGT) to propose a novel conceptual framework tailored to the digitally mediated, informal nature of meal-sharing. This techno-practical and equity-driven model advances both theoretical understanding and policy innovation in platform taxation.