Basic Income Simulations for the Province of British Columbia

David Green, Jonathan Rhys Kesselman, Lindsay Tedds, Daria Crisan and Gillian Petit

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: An important component of the work to be completed by the British Columbia’s Expert Panel on Basic Income is to design simulations to look at how various basic income (BI) models could work in B.C. (B.C. Poverty Reduction, 2018). The intent of these simulations is to identify the potential impacts and financial implications for B.C. residents of different variants of a BI. Given the poverty reduction targets passed by the B.C. government, detailed in Petit and Tedds (2020d), the potential impacts include those on the incidence and the depths of poverty in the province (B.C. Poverty Reduction, n.d.). The panel ran over 16,000 different BI scenarios to consider in B.C., which were modelled using Statistics Canada’s Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) program. We evaluate different BI scenarios in terms of their implications for a variety of measures, including cost, number of recipients, rates of poverty, depths of poverty, distributional affects, and inequality impacts. This paper provides details regarding these simulations. Our goal in this paper is simply to consider different versions of a basic income in terms of both their cost implications and their implications for poverty reduction. We believe that identifying the most effective variants of a basic income in terms of these two criteria will help sharpen the conversation about the applicability of a basic income as a policy option for B.C.

Keywords: Basic income; Simulations; Statistics Canada’s Social Policy Simulation Database and Model; Poverty Reduction; Distributional affects; Inequality. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 I39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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