Rethinking Basic Income: Welfare Principles, Institutional Contexts, and Job Search Behaviour

Simon Watkins ()

Chapter Chapter 1 in Basic Income, Work Incentives and Job Search Behaviour, 2025, pp 1-11 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract This book examines how basic income may impact on job search behaviour amongst unemployed individuals by analysing its defining principles, unconditionality, universalism, and non-withdrawal, within existing welfare regimes. The research develops a new ideal type framework to measure how closely ten European welfare regimes approximate basic income principles. Using qualitative comparative analysis and time use data, the study examines a range of welfare configurations to identify their impact on job search intensity. The findings challenge conventional assumptions about basic income's incentivising effects, revealing that its impact is neither linear nor deterministic but emerges from complex interactions between policy mechanisms and institutional contexts. This approach provides a foundation for more realistic expectations about basic income implementation and advances debates that have often relied more on theoretical assumptions than systematic evidence.

Keywords: Basic income principles; Job search behaviour; Welfare regimes; Labour market participation; Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA); Unconditionality; Universalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

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:pal:etbchp:978-3-031-99197-4_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783031991974

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-99197-4_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().