Volume 7, Issue 1

In 2004, the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was reformed so that payments to farmers were unrelated to agricultural production; the Single Farm Payment (SFP). The objective was to reduce the market distorting incentives of the CAP. Utilising the farm data we compared it to Basic Income (BI). While there are some similarities, the SFP is functionally quite different from a BI. They are both income transfers independent of production. However, the SFP is not a flat rate payment, but is based on historical production. Like a BI, its unconditionality facilitates a change to a more market-rational production system, but these effects are relatively low. Equity objectives are also quite dissimilar relative to a pure BI instrument. There is some environmental-related conditionality, so it is more akin to Atkinson’s participation income. Nevertheless, the SFP can be regarded as equivalent to a relatively strong transition or stepping stone to a BI.

Our real-effort laboratory experiment compares an unconditional basic income (UBI) scheme with conventional systems with and without redistribution, respectively. Participants chose between three options: working for themselves, working for the group, or enjoying leisure. Neither the choice of options nor that of work efforts is sensitive to the transfer scheme even though UBI constitutes a natural reference point for participants’ earnings in our experiment. However, UBI significantly reduced income dispersion at only a small cost in terms of forgone production and budget deficit.

Basic Income (BI) aims to guarantee a universal and unconditional income to everyone. However, Latin America has income programmes for economically dependent people. These trends pose specific questions for the BI debate: can a universal and unconditional policy be reached starting from a conditional targeted policy? How would those conditionalities be considered in order to improve human capital? I discuss the Latin American road to BI and look at the Brazilian Bolsa Família and the Asignación Universal por Hijo (recently approved in Argentina) programmes. Both schemes are chosen because they share common characteristics of Conditional Cash Transfer programmes. Furthermore, they are among the few in the region considered part of the BI debate: in the case of Brazil, as part of the Lei de Renda Básica de Cidadania, and in the case of Argentina, as a response to the bill proposals presented at the National Congress.

Despite the large number of studies in the past two decades about the basic income proposal, its relationship to the process of international migration has not yet been comprehensively addressed. In this article, we explore the feasibility of implementing a basic income that would include, in addition to citizens, those immigrants with more than one year of residence. The main objective of this study is to examine the hypothesis that basic income produces a pull effect on migration. The analysis focuses on the behaviour of agents seeking to migrate because of a basic income in a possible destination country. Using theoretical arguments and empirical analysis, we question the magnitude and even the existence of this pull effect of basic income. In our view, there are no sufficient grounds to think that introducing a basic income would lead to an increase in immigrant population.