Basic Income System Research Articles

Towards an ecology of care: Basic Income after the nation-state

The following paper is about care1. It proposes a political vision to move towards a care-centred society that will allow the flourishing of everyone while keeping the planet inhabitable and thriving. For this utopian horizon that we name an ecology of care, we propose the creation of a Basic Income system that is constituted outside of and beyond the realm of the nation-state, as a means of changing humanity’s relationship to itself and transitioning from capitalism to a commons-based society. It argues for a disembedding of work—and the time allocated to it—from money, through a reformulation of the production of money in the form of an income distributed as an equal share to all those who are part of the planetary commons. Finally, it connects this Basic Income proposal with degrowth as a radical and necessary reformulation of society that considers its ecological roots and replaces the obsession with endless economic growth with the principle of taking care of people.

TRADE UNIONS AND BASIC INCOME: SOME DANISH EXPERIENCES

Theoretically, there are many good arguments that unions should support a proposal on basic income. The main reason for the Danish trade unions resistance to basic income reform is that it would go against the short-term interest of the unions in organisational self-maintenance. Trade unions will lose power in relation to their members with a basic income. Trade unions have control over individual members by virtue of the collective agreement system and the labour law system. If you have a basic income system, the individual worker will decide when he or she wants to leave his workplace and strike. Suppose a single worker or a group of workers leave their workplace because of dissatisfaction with the working condition. In that case, they will be punished financially according to the rules of labour law rely on any support from their trade union.

코로나19 감염병 위기에 대한 위험인식과 대응

The purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between economic risk, lifestyle, psychological state, and risk prevention behavior under COVID-19 risk perception. As a result of the analysis, it was found that risk perception regarding COVID-19 has a significant effect on economic risk, lifestyle, and psychological state. Based on these research results, the policy implications for the infectious disease crisis are as follows. First, in order to conduct education for the prevention of infectious diseases, it is necessary to develop and disseminate educational materials for each characteristic of infectious disease, and to enhance the infectious disease management capabilities of schools and offices of education. Second, in order to protect individual psychological health from infectious diseases, it is important to take measures such as psychological intervention and support. Third, the economic risk caused by COVID-19 requires the establishment of an institution at the government level. Considering the long-term spread of COVID-19, the high fatality rate and the degree of damage, it is difficult to solve the problem with disaster subsidies or disaster basic income alone, so it is necessary to link the tax system, disaster subsidy, and disaster basic income system.

Basic Income Pilots: Uses, Limitations and Design Principles

Abstract The position underlying this article is that while pilots are not strictly required to justify moving in the direction of a basic income system, nevertheless they can play several useful functions in the debate. These include rebutting common preconceptions, for instance that basic income will make people ‘lazy’, indicating non-monetary benefits such as improved health and wellbeing, and testing how a basic income might best be introduced in a given region, country or city. In that context the article goes on to present 19 guiding principles for the design, implementation and evaluation of basic income pilots, with examples of selected experiments and pilots past and present.

What is Full Employment? A Historical-Institutional Analysis of a Changing Concept and Its Policy Relevance for the Twenty-First Century Post-COVID-19 Economies

: Unemployment and the related concept of full employment have acquired different meaning depending on the historical evolution of capitalist economies since the eighteenth century. The purpose of this article is to provide a broad historical perspective and to contextualize the meaning of full employment in a COVID-19 world and possible aftermath. In opposition to the view of many economists and policy makers on both the Right and Left of the political spectrum, the article affirms that a full-employment policy is not passé. What we have learned from the COVID-19 crisis is that a full-employment commitment ought to be coupled with a “full” or universal basic income system. These should be viewed as complementary and not competing policy visions for a twenty-first-century post-COVID-19 world.

Basic Income—an early Icelandic experiment**

Abstract Old age, illness, and/or physical and/or mental disabilities may limit the ability of an individual to generate enough income to cover basic costs of living. Most developed nations provide financial assistance to persons with limited abilities. In 1974, an Icelandic government passed an act of law providing a tax credit, payable to taxpayers under certain conditions. The tax allowance was applied first to settle the taxes and public levies owed by the taxpayer, with any amount remaining paid out to the individual. This system can be seen as a first, limited attempt at establishing a partial universal basic income of sorts. This social interaction between stakeholders on how to share the tax revenue between the taxpayers led to a government crisis. The shareholders in this partial universal basic income system, the state and municipalities, the old age community, the trade unions, and the employers all have different financial and political interests and were affected by this reform. The lesson is that a basic income would need strong supporters if implemented, where the role of the government and/or the parliament would be mapped. Its supporters must be able to withstand the pressure from the social partners in the labor market because of the interactivity of the social security system and the pension fund system, which is not a part of the fiscal system in Iceland. The conflict of interests becomes apparent.

Welfare Dynamics and Employment: Heterogeneous Paths Through Means-tested Basic Income in Germany

AbstractThis study contributes to the international literature on welfare dynamics, by providing a differentiated picture of paths through the means-tested Basic Income for recipients who are capable of working, after the reorganisation of the basic income system in Germany in 2005. We analyse the employment and benefit trajectories of individuals who became recipients for the first time between 2007 and 2009 by methods of sequence and cluster analysis based on representative administrative individual data. We find a significant polarisation between long-term recipients and those with an early exit from benefit receipt via full-time employment. One in three new recipients remains in benefit receipt for the next years and shows almost no employment activities. Approximately 23 percent leave benefit receipt quickly and work in full-time employment. Several other different paths exist between these two poles. These heterogeneous trajectories should be characteristic for broad basic income systems and require a variety of policies that in part are beyond labour market policies.

Legal Issues of the Basic Income System in the Fourth Industrial Revolution Era

Legal Issues of the Basic Income System in the Fourth Industrial Revolution Era

Framing the Basic Income: An Experimental Study of How Arguments and Metaphors Influence Individuals’ Opinion Formation

AbstractUsing an experimental design, this paper tackles the question of the framing impact of metaphors by focusing on the opportunity to implement a basic income (BI) system in a given polity. We take advantage of the preliminary stage of the BI debate in Belgium to study the influence of discursive strategies on the opinion formation process of individuals, since carefully choosing the arguments employed to address this question can help increase its psychological feasibility. Our experiment aims at determining to what extent the confrontation of individuals to metaphors illustrating the BI system impacts the way they apprehend its implementation. We show that very light variations in an informative text can induce major differences in the opinion formation process of the participants. BI proponents should thus pay attention to which metaphors are put forward in the public debate, as this could modify its outcome.

A Study of the Feasibility of the Basic Income System

A Study of the Feasibility of the Basic Income System

Unconditional Basic Income in the Czech Republic: What Type of Taxes Could Fund It? A Theoretical Tax Analysis

Abstract This paper contains a summary of public support for the idea of unconditional basic income in the Czech Republic in the first part. Interest in unconditional income can be found both in the Czech political sphere and in the social sciences community. In the second part, the article theoretically analyzes the possible sources of unconditional basic income funding. The aim of this paper is to support argumentation in favor of the implementation of BI by a systematic analysis of the real possibilities of its funding through the state tax revenues. The feasibility of funding a BI scheme using taxes on labor, property, consumption, environmental taxes, financial transaction tax, and tax on the transfer of information is considered. Consideration is also given to administrative savings that the basic income system could bring. Due to political enforceability of BI, it is important to contemplate and discuss the distortions and other problems of proposed changes in taxation, which would not be negligible as can be expected.

Labor Supply Elasticity in the Unconditional Basic Income System: Data Sources and Methodological Issues

This study deals with five sources of data that may help to answer the question of how labor supply would respond to the introduction of unconditional basic income. Research of lottery winners’ labor supply and the results of field experiments, in which the behavior of households who have received a regular unconditional income for a limited time period was observed and is then investigated and discussed. Results of the laboratory experiment, the estimates of microsimulation models, and the results of the opinion polls are also examined. The surveyed data sources show mainly a slight decline in labor supply. However, none of these data were collected in situations that would fully correspond with the expected conditions of decision-making that would occur with the basic income. Any results derived from them therefore need to be considered with caution.

A Review of the Proposal of Constitutional Amendment Advisory Committee in the Korean National Assembly in 2014

A Review of the Proposal of Constitutional Amendment Advisory Committee in the Korean National Assembly in 2014

기본소득과 국토보유세 : 등장 배경, 도입 방안, 그리고 예상 효과

Rising income inequality, deteriorating status of workers, a huge amount of unearned income from real estate, fragile social safety net and weak redistribution function of public finance have contributed to the emergence of basic income since the late 2000’s in Korea. This paper suggests two policy models of basic income that can be applied to Korea. The first model, the Basic Income Model I, combines basic income with national land holding tax. The Basic Income Model Ⅱ has a plan to procure the necessary revenue from land tax, environmental tax, and citizen income tax. If a basic income is introduced in Korea in the future, the actual policy should lie somewhere between Model Ⅰ and Model II. BR Our simulation results show that under Model Ⅰ, where the amount of annual basic income per person will range from 300,000 Won to 2,300,000 Won, 97% of the total households will become net beneficiaries of the policy. In contrast, the annual basic income will rise to 3,600,000 Won per capita with Model II, making 83% of the total households net beneficiaries. As the dividend per capita is greater in Model Ⅱ, the redistributive effect of income, which is shown in terms of the Gini-coefficient improvement, is much larger in Model Ⅱ than in Model I. Yet, because Model Ⅱ requires 185 trillion Won for its implementation, it seems politically less feasible to apply the Model II to the current Korean society.BR Even with the implementation of Model I, the softer model, we expect the following changes to take place in Korea. First, the propensity to seek rents will be reduced after the imposition of national land tax on all land owners. Second, inequality in land ownership will be mitigated and Chaebols and large enterprises will focus more on productive investments rather than on land speculation. Third, basic income raises the sense of entitlements among all citizens, which will lead to social inclusion and cohesion. Lastly, the welfare system will be reinforced and become more sustainable by granting dividend to the middle-class under the basic income system.

A Universal Allowance to all Citizens: Juliet Rhys-Williams' Alternative to The Beveridge Plan

Studying the social and economic ideas underpinning political debates offers a deeper understanding of policy decision-making and institutional change. According to a well-established tradition, policies can be regarded as embodying ideas about society, the economy, the state, citizens and relations between these. They embody views about justice, equality and individual responsibility (Alcock et. al. 2000: 184). With this in mind, we shall investigate Lady Juliet Rhys-Williams’ critical reflections on the Beveridge Report and the alternative proposal she presented in Something to Look Forward to (1943). In this book, she elaborated an integrated approach to social security and income tax aimed at providing complete security to those classes, especially the independent workers, widows and spinsters, who are not adequately covered by the Beveridge scheme (Rhys-Williams 1943: vii). At the very heart of her social vision was the idea of distributing a universal allowance (basic income system) to all British citizens (children included). The rationale underpinning Rhys-Williams’ basic income system was the recognition that the problem afflicting British society was the ill-distribution of wealth, that hindered economic growth and prevented the attainment of full employment.

Core Support for the New Economy

This paper proposes an income guarantee called Core Support (CS), defined as compensation for household activities such as childcare, food preparation, care of elderly or ill persons in the home, and maintenance of the home and of household vehicles and appliances. The immediate goals of the proposal are to highlight, through compensation, the reality that the productive activities carried on in households are of essential importance for the whole economy and society, and to enable the people who carry out these essential activities to do so without having to short-change the care work because of the need to earn money through the market. The CS concept builds on literature on Basic Income Guarantees (BIG) and on feminist economics, which tends to be skeptical of BIG proposals. By addressing intra-household allocations, CS shows how a basic income system can promote a more caring democracy and a more partnership-oriented socioeconomic system that rewards the essential work of care. Appendix A surveys seven ways by which such a program could be financed.

Means testing versus basic income: The (lack of) political support for a universal allowance

This paper studies the political economy of a basic income (BI) versus a means tested welfare scheme. We show in a very simple setting that if society votes on the type of system, its generosity as well as the “severity” of means testing (if any), a BI system could only emerge in the political equilibrium under very strong and empirically implausible conditions. Instead, the political process leads to a means tested system. The necessity to draw political support does affect the design of the system, but it only implies that means testing becomes less severe so that benefits are extended also to the middle classes. However, a fully universal system is rejected by a majority.

Child labor, idiosyncratic shocks, and social policy

In this paper, we provide a dynamic model with heterogeneous agents to study child labor in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Households facing adverse shocks may use child labor as a means to smooth consumption. We show that the introduction of an unemployment insurance program and/or a universal basic income system helps eliminate child labor endogenously in this context. A calibration to South Africa in the 1990s is provided.

Designing a Basic Income System with a Social Welfare Function

AbstractThere is an irreducible conflict between, on the one hand, the desire to allocate income in society in an equitable way and, on the other, the desire to alleviate poverty. The conflict materializes itself in the problem of designing a basic income (or negative income tax) system which requires formulating a workable compromise. This paper approaches the problem through solving a mathematical program whose utility‐based objective function explicitly embodies both considerations. The solution describes a simple basic income system and its comparative statics indicate how the specification of the objective function leads to a more, or less, pro‐poor solution.

Basic Income: An Instrument for Transformation in the Twenty-First Century

This paper argues a basic income system could transform the means of income redistribution and social empowerment in society, and move us decisively towards the egalitarian principle of giving everyone equal access to the conditions to live a flourishing life. Basic income is a universal non-conditional payment, paid at the same level to everyone regardless of income or wealth. The paper considers basic income as a transformative strategy from a number of perspectives: economic, social, cultural and environmental, and then considers basic income as an alternative and transformative idea for Ireland. It presents three potential pathways in which it could be implemented and elaborates and provides full costings on how one such proposal could be funded and concludes it is affordable, feasible and politically viable in Ireland today.