Universal basic income: the new political economy of an old idea

Leire Rincon and Tim Vlandas

Chapter 22 in Handbook of Labour Market Policy in Advanced Democracies, 2023, pp 309-325 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The idea of a universal, unconditional, and regular basic income provided to all has a long history and academic lineage. In this chapter, we explore the new political economy of this old idea in the context of enduring and novel labour market challenges, most notably precarity and insecurity, arising from deindustrialisation, globalisation, and automation. We show that most existing literature has focused on the normative desirability and economic feasibility of introducing a basic income. More recent studies have started to pay attention to the crucial role of politics of a basic income. We argue that the political economy of a basic income follows well-established income and labour market risks cleavages in the electorates, while cutting across traditional partisan conflict lines of both voter and interest groups. The resulting cross-cutting politics of support for basic income will crucially shape the likely future of UBI and its ability to address labour market challenges.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy; Sustainable Development Goals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781800880887.00031 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20451_22

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().