Shanta Devarajan, Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region, has written a short article on basic income for blog of the Brookings Institution, an American non-partisan public policy think tank.
A self-described advocate for basic income, Devarajan summarizes three arguments for the policy. First, it provides an efficient way to use revenues from a nation’s natural resources. Second, it may be more effective than in-kind and targeted benefits at improving the welfare of the poor. Third, automation and labor-saving technologies are restructuring the nature of work such that it might no longer be necessary (or possible) for everyone to work in order to receive an income.
Read the full article:
Shanta Devarajan, “Three reasons for universal basic income,” Brookings, February 15, 2017.
Reviewed by Dave Clegg
Photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 World Bank Photo Collection
