The idea of basic income – a universal grant provided regularly by governments to all citizens, irrespective of their income bracket – has gained widespread traction in recent times. The paradigm s...

Basic income: a transformative policy for India

The mental health effects of a Universal Basic Income: A synthesis of the evidence from previous pilots

El libro recientemente publicado Poor Economics -y la tecnica de evaluaciones aleatorias que dan sustento a sus conclusionestienen el potencial para cambiar radicalmente la manera de disenar politicas para combatir la pobreza en el mundo. El libro fue escrito por Abhijit Banerjee y Esther Duflo, dos jovenes reconocidos economistas del MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Duflo, nacida en Francia y educada en el Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris y MIT, fue ganadora en 2010 del premio John Bates Clark al mejor economista menor de 40 anos y considerada por la revista Foreign Policy como una de los 100 intelectuales mas influyentes del mundo. Abhijit Banerjee educado en la Universidad de Calcuta (su ciudad de origen) y la Universidad de Harvard tambien es ganador de numerosos premios.

/pdf/resena-bibliografica-poor-economics-a-radical-rethinking-of-32amrx6vdn.pdf

Reseña bibliográfica : poor economics. A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty

We use the Targeted Subsidies Reform implemented in Iran in 2011 to recover empirically the social valuations of Iranian households relying on the assumption of optimal taxes. Unlike the existing literature, we do not restrict attention to a specific pattern for the incentive constraints associated with nonlinear income taxation. Instead we recover the Lagrange multipliers corresponding to these constraints. We find evidence of a significant redistribution toward the bottom three deciles of the income distribution before the reform. This redistribution is however limited by an incentive constraint where the rich envy the social treatment of the poor. At the outcome of the reform incentives no longer matter and the social welfare function of the government of Iran displays a Benthamite-like form.

How incentives matter ? An illustration from the Targeted Subsidies reform in Iran

El sistema "Speenhamland", el Ingreso Ciudadano y la "retórica de la reacción"

The objective of this article is to determine, as conclusively as possible, if the implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) would lead to a significant reduction in the working age population labour supply. If this were true, implementation of a UBI may not be sustainable. To do this, we will compile empirical evidence from studies over the last few decades on the effects of implementation of a UBI on employment. We apply the PRISMA methodology to better judge their validity, which ensures maximum reliability of the results by avoiding biases and making the work reproducible. Given that the methodologies used in these studies are diverse, they are reviewed to contextualize the results taking into account the possible limitations detected in these methodologies. While many authors have been writing about this issue citing experiences or experiments, the added value of this article is that it performs a systematic review following a widely tested scientific methodology. Over 1200 documents that discuss the UBI/employment relationship have been reviewed. We found a total of 50 empirical cases, of which 18 were selected, and 38 studies with contrasted empirical evidence on this relationship. The results speak for themselves: Despite a detailed search, we have not found any evidence of a significant reduction in labour supply. Instead, we found evidence that labour supply increases globally among adults, men and women, young and old, and the existence of some insignificant and functional reductions to the system such as a decrease in workers from the following categories: Children, the elderly, the sick, those with disabilities, women with young children to look after, or young people who continued studying. These reductions do not reduce the overall supply since it is largely offset by increased supply from other members of the community.

/pdf/is-there-empirical-evidence-on-how-the-implementation-of-a-5flq0ohvz1.pdf

María José Asensio-Coto

Papers

Is There Empirical Evidence on How the Implementation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) Affects Labour Supply? A Systematic Review