Unconditional Basic Income and Welfare State Reform in Representative Democracies

Lei Delsen ()
Additional contact information
Lei Delsen: Institute for Management Research, Radboud University

Chapter Chapter 1 in Empirical Research on an Unconditional Basic Income in Europe, 2019, pp 1-27 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract An increase in income and wealth inequality does not only have negative social and economic consequences, it is also a threat to the functioning of our democracies. The debate on the introduction of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is beset with unanswered questions, with conjectures and unproven beliefs that call for additional research by economists and a uniform definition. The current distribution-and-income-based national welfare state could be transformed into a ‘prosperity state’, in which the economy is designed around delivering the capabilities for human flourishing. The introduction of a UBI, funded by progressive consumption and wealth taxes, should be on the research agenda of economics, and on the policy agenda in representative democracies. It has the potential to enlarge the economic pie, and to improve the distribution of income, for it reflects the contribution to society. Empirics on UBI are limited. Moreover, research is mainly focussed on short-term labour market effects, poverty and income inequality reduction, and there is some attention for health and well-being. However, the long-term effect on the environment are fully disregarded. The aim of this book is to scrutinise and comment on some of the main issues of the basic income, to contribute to the knowledge basis on the basic income, and to support better informed—evidence-based—policy making, and to bring a better world about.

Keywords: Welfare state reform; Economic science; Prosperity state; Unconditional basic income; Human flourishing; Sustainable economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-030-30044-9_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030300449

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-30044-9_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Contributions to Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().