Rethinking Corporate Accountability in the Global Digital Economy

Recent scholarship in migration ethics has focused on states and border controls, but the infiltration of digital technologies into global economic processes necessitates a broader analysis. The rise of “digital nomads”—high-income earners from High-Income Countries (HICs) who relocate temporarily to Low-Income Countries (LICs) while maintaining ties with global corporations—exemplifies how non-state actors leverage new digital infrastructures to reshape labor mobility and exploit global disparities. Although digital nomadism differs from classic “sweatshop” models, where corporations source cheap labor at low wages, both scenarios stem from firms’ pursuit of profitable asymmetries. In digital nomadism, companies deploy well-paid remote employees in LIC urban enclaves to reduce living and operating costs. However, these digital nomads consume public infrastructure—roads, healthcare, educational systems—funded over generations by local communities without contributing to the intergenerational reciprocity that justifies these resources. In this paper, I explore how digital technologies restructure value creation, labor market dynamics, and stakeholder agency. Digital nomads exemplify how global firms, aided by data-driven gig platforms and remote-work tools, navigate and manipulate regulatory differentials to their advantage. LIC governments, often with limited democratic legitimacy, engage in a race to the bottom to attract remote, high-income workers, foregoing tax revenues and thereby ceding more power to corporate interests. How might we extend democratic principles beyond traditional workplaces to acknowledge the global, technologically mediated distribution of costs and benefits through corporations? I argue that responding to the digital nomad phenomenon requires recognizing corporations as central political agents, bearing obligations to communities whose resources they appropriate. Drawing on a contractualist model of intergenerational justice, I propose direct compensation from corporations to LIC residents. Such redistributive mechanisms address the absence of international fiscal transfers and restore some measure of equity and reciprocity. This approach also indicates a need to redefine “value creation” in the digital economy and expand democratic oversight to encompass the global systems of mobility and infrastructural use enabled by digital technologies. By situating digital nomadism within broader debates on automation, surveillance, and the algorithmic mediation of economic life, we move beyond state-centric frameworks. Instead, we envision more robust and inclusive ethical and democratic models, capable of holding all relevant actors—corporations, digital platforms, and global professional networks—accountable for emerging forms of exploitation and inequality.