Is unconditional basic income a viable alternative to other social welfare measures?

Ugo Colombino

IZA World of Labor, 2019, No 128v2, 128

Abstract: Globalization and automation have brought about a tremendous increase in productivity, with enormous benefits, but also a dramatic reallocation of jobs, skills, and incomes, which might jeopardize the full realization of those benefits. Current social policies may not be adequate to successfully redistribute the gains from automation and globalization or to advance the reallocation of jobs and skills. Under certain circumstances, an unconditional basic income might be a better alternative for achieving these goals. It is simple, transparent, and has low administrative costs, though it may require higher taxes or a cut/reallocation of other public expenditures.

Keywords: basic income; means testing; incentives; redistribution; globalization; automation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H24 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://wol.iza.org/uploads/articles/128/pdfs/is-u ... welfare-measures.pdf (application/pdf)
https://wol.iza.org/articles/is-unconditional-basi ... ial-welfare-measures (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Is unconditional basic income a viable alternative to other social welfare measures? (2015)
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:iza:izawol:journl:2019:n:128

Access Statistics for this article

IZA World of Labor is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA World of Labor from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ().