Volume 9, Issue 1-2 -

This article explores how the demand for an unconditional basic income (UBI) was discussed in the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in the 1970s. A resolution for UBI was passed with a majority vote at the National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1977. However, this fact appears not to have been properly recorded in any academic literature. This is slightly surprising because it has been more than a decade since feminist academics started to argue either for or against UBI. The resolution was raised by working class women in the Claimants Unions Movement. This article records and analyses their feminist articulation of the UBI and the unfortunate fate of their resolution along with their intersections with other feminists. It is based mainly on oral historical interviews with ex-claimants women (128).

This article draws on innovation and agenda-setting theories to identify critical points in the realization of basic income in Finland. Our empirical data comprise 13 models of either unconditional basic income or social security reform proposals with some similarity to basic income. The models examined were published in Finland between 1984 and 2011. Using these data, we build a conceptual framework that enables us to discuss the role of the content, players, political and macro-economic context, and public interpretations in the successes and failures of the basic income initiatives.

The thesis of cognitive capitalism leads to a radical reform of the distribution of wealth. A basic primary income (BPI) scheme is the keystone of such reform. This paper shows that the justification of a BPI can also be founded on a re-examination of the notion of productive labor linked to the rise of the cognitive dimension of labor. This conception of basic income as primary income completes ethical and social justifications of BI. Our argumentation is structured in two connected parts. After an overview of cognitive capitalism, the first part is dedicated to the main foundations of our proposal of BPI. The second part concerns the articulation between our proposal for BPI and the modalities of funding one. We explain how the question of funding BPI is closely linked to its theoretical justifications.

This article describes the main results obtained from a microsimulation model designed by the authors in order to analyze the possibilities of financing a Basic Income (BI) in the territory of Catalonia on the basis of information provided by the IRPF (personal income tax) system. The BI proposal guarantees the material existence of the population and is not only desirable but also feasible.

The Social Security System in Spain is significantly broader and more complex than in other EU countries. One of its problems is that it was not created as a single whole. Instead of this, there are different kinds of social assistance service depending on the region, so there is a real need to reduce the complexity of these schemes and homogenise the benefits paid out in a general basic social benefit. In this paper we propose a new approach to universal basic protection benefit (called Basic Social Benefit) as a way of unifying and rationalising the different grants and economic aids currently available in Spain in order to cover the basic needs of all citizens. This is the first study made in Spain in calculating the lump sum of a basic social benefit for the whole population. For this, we use Quantile Regression (QR) to calculate the principal variables that explain the minimum vital expenditures of Spanish citizens. We also show the total financial cost of this measure for Spain in 2010 and a projection of the cost for the next 12 years.

An explicit unconditional basic income linked with a proportional tax rate and corresponding negative income tax schedule are generally thought to produce an equal distribution of incomes. They are so to say mathematically uniform systems. If we try to implement these schedules on an existing system of social transfers and taxes, the results may nevertheless be different. One problem is that taxes are generally calculated on yearly basis but social transfers are paid on monthly or even daily basis. There can be also other differences in the implementation. In this paper a simulation experiment with the Finnish tax and transfer system is presented. Two levels of basic income are defined: a normal basic income for adults over 18 years and a bit higher basic income (basic pension) for pensioners. Two alternative simulations are made: one corresponding to an unconditional basic income model and the other corresponding to the idea of negative income tax. Then the distributional effects and various transfer and income flows are studied.