by Stanislas Jourdan | Sep 25, 2016 | News
Twice in a week, the French socialist Prime Minister raised the topic of basic income, pledging to open up the discussion on how to modernize the country’s welfare system.
Updated on 26/10 after Nicolas Sarkozy’s statement on basic income.
For a second time this week and third time this year Manuel Valls, the French Prime minister, mentioned basic income as a possible way forward.
In a statement on his Facebook page, the minister said: “We need to open up new paths. Here is one: a universal income, a single benefit, open to all starting from 18, replacing a dozen existing benefits. The government will engage a dialogue with all stakeholders in order to build a flexible, simple and therefore more efficient solution for all individual situations. I think this debate should be opened. In order to go further! To reinforce our social model!”
“We know how much complexity increases inequality. Having access to a minimal income should not be an obstacle race,” Valls also said earlier this week at a ceremony in remembrance of Michel Rocard, a prominent figure of French Left and spiritual father of the RMI, the first minimum income scheme implemented in France in 1988.
Back in April, Valls made strong commitments to modernize and simplify the welfare system in France. This happened after the Government published a report outlining bold recommendations to simplify and modernize France’s welfare system. Although the report doesn’t endorse basic income, it provides an in-depth analysis of the idea, and offers ambitious policy proposals that could pave the ways towards UBI. In particular, it proposes to extend the eligibility criteria of the current minimum income scheme to people from 18 to 25 years old, to make benefit payments automatic, and to partly individualize the benefits.
At the time, Valls committed the government to look into the proposals and speed up the implementations of the proposed measures.
Ambiguous statements
However, the Prime Minister has always been ambiguous in defining “basic income”. Speaking of a “universal income” in an earlier confused statement this year, he made it clear that he believed that such a system should be means-tested. According to him, universal income should not be “paid to everyone including those who have sufficient income – it would be too costly and meaningless – but a targeted grant to all of those who really need it.”
Race to the elections
With the French general elections in the horizon (May 2017) and the primaries campaign hitting the media everyday, French politicians are quickly joining the basic income camp, especially on the Left.
Already several candidates have publicly supported basic income in the context of their Party primaries. In the Greens, all candidates support the measure (Karima Delli, Yannick Jadot, Michèle Rivasi, Cécile Duflot). In the Socialist Party, Benoît Hamon recently announced his strong support for the idea. Emmanuel Macron, who recently left his post as Minister of the Economy to focus on his electoral campaign also said he is interested in the idea.
Among the conservatives, MP Frédéric Lefebvre has become a vocal UBI supporter and was intending to run as candidate for the Party’s primaries, but he did not collect enough sponsors. In the meantime, former President Nicolas Sarkozy who is trying to make is political come-back and run the election again said he is against UBI. However he is in favor of a single benefit scheme which would be a move towards UBI. ” I want those who live on the welfare state to be obliged to accept a job, a training or to do volunteering for the community” Sarkozy explained.
Other socialist candidates including Jean-Luc Bennahmias, Arnaud Montebourg and Marie-Noëlle Lienemann are also known to be sympathetic to the idea but have not made committing statements so far.
Behind the growing fear of the rise of the Far-right’s Front National, chances have never been so high for France to seriously look into the the possibility to adopt a basic income, or at least to implement paving stones towards it.
Picture: CC Parti Socialiste
by Kate McFarland | Sep 25, 2016 | News
In a blog post dated September 22, the charity GiveDirectly announced that it will begin an initial pilot study of a basic income guarantee in a village in Kenya in late October.
According to GiveDirectly’s announcement, the pilot will “test the operational details of the model and also generate qualitative insights which we will then feed back into the ultimate quantitative evaluation.”
In the same post, the research team laid out some further details concerning its full study (the start date of which remains unspecified). In the full study, experiments will be conducted in two counties in rural Kenya — one in which GiveDirectly has acted previously (with few issues and near 100% participation rates), and one new county.
Villages in these counties will be divided into three treatment groups: one in which all adult residents receive a guaranteed basic income for 12 years, one in which all adult residents receive a guaranteed basic income for two years, and one in which all adult residents receive a lump sum equivalent to the two-year basic income. The amount of the basic income will be approximately $0.75 per day, which will be held fixed across villages in all three treatment groups. Data will also be collected on a control group of villages in which no cash transfers are given to residents.
In the blog post, the researchers mention a particular interest in the question of how a long-term income guarantee impacts risk-taking, such as in starting a business. They go on to add that, given the scale of the experiment, “we have reasonably good odds of detecting impacts not only on individuals, but also on village-level markets.”
GiveDirectly aims to include 40 villages in the first treatment group and 80 in each of the latter two. This would result in roughly 26,000 individuals receiving cash transfers.
There are some minor complications. For instance, according to a blog post published on September 5, lower-than-usual participation rates are being witnessed in some parts of Kenya — which the researchers attribute largely to misgivings and skepticism about the nature of the charitable organization:
We’ve found that people typically refuse out of skepticism. Potential recipients find it hard to believe that a new organization like GiveDirectly would give roughly a year’s salary in cash, unconditionally. As a result, many people have created their own narratives to explain the cash, including rumors that the money is associated with cults or devil worship.
However, the charity is working to improve its outreach to communities and stresses that, contrary to some press, relatively high rates of nonparticipation do not bespeak a “fatal problem” with the experiment.
GiveDirectly has raised over $11 million since April, when the organization announced its plan to fund a major study of basic income. It has also assembled a team of distinguished advisors, including Alan Krueger (former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers) and MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Tavneet Suri (MIT). In July, an article about the work of GiveDirectly appeared in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Reference
GiveDirectly team (September 22, 2016) “New details on our basic income pilot”
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 Evandro Sudré
Special thanks to Kate’s supporters on Patreon
by Jenna van Draanen | Sep 24, 2016 | News
The Canadian House of Commons Finance Committee recently solicited submissions in their pre-budget consultations to give the public the opportunity to provide input in the development of the 2017 federal budget.
The Basic Income Canada Network (BICN) made a submission to the Finance Committee in August that urged the committee to consider creating a basic income that would be, “universally available to Canadians in times of need.” The four-page submission covers what a basic income is, what kind of basic income BICN is advocating for, and why basic income is so urgently needed in Canada.
Three specific recommendations that BICN provides in its submission are:
1) Take immediate steps in the direction of a basic income for working-age adults using federal refundable tax credits and other means compatible with the model of benefits for seniors and children;
2) Undertake a thorough review and exploration of ways, in the context of fair and effective taxation as well as poverty reduction strategies, to fully realize a basic income for everyone;
3) Cooperate with and support basic income initiatives of other orders of government, including by fostering public dialogue, consultation, analysis and policy development as this is in the interest of all Canadians.
To read more about this submission see:
Roderick Benns, “Basic Income Canada Network urges support of basic income in House submission.” Leaders and Legacies. August 9, 2016.
For the original document submitted to the House of Commons Finance Committee, see:
Sheila Regehr, “Submission to the House of Commons Finance Committee”, www.basicincomecanada.org, August 3, 2016
by Toru Yamamori | Sep 23, 2016 | News
As we’ve already reported here, Finland’s Ministry of Social Affairs and Health announced their plan for the basic income experiment, and requested citizens’ opinions on it, on 25th August. We’ve also reported Finnish experts’ responses here, and the Greens’ response here. This article reports the response by the Pirate Party of Finland (Piraattipuolue).
The Pirate Party of Finland endorses an unconditional basic income. On the day the Finnish government announced their detailed plan, UBI advocates from the Pirates Parties of Finland, Iceland and Sweden gathered in Turku for a seminar on UBI.
Tapani Karvinen, the former chair of the party, responded to BIEN on the government’s plan:
Largest problem is that [the] experiment is going to analyze the employment of the target group, not other factors, such as health, participation in unpaid communal work, arts or self-development by studying or hobbies. Target group of 2000 people is inadequate, as the preliminary study suggested 2000 + 8000 whose basic income costs would have been covered from the Finnish Social Insurance Institute’s unemployment fund, therefore creating no extra costs for the study. Excluding students and state pensioners means that there will be no information if basic income will encourage creation of innovations, entrepreneurship and employment of graduates, or mental and physical health of elders.
In short, [the] study’s target group is not wide enough and is not analyzing all the crucial factors, which affect the well-being of individuals and therefore also economy and costs of state. A further study is necessary to complete the analysis of the effects which basic income would have to Finland as a whole.
Petrus Pennanen, the deputy chair of the party, also told BIEN about his views of the plan:
It just replaces the application based minimum unemployment / welfare benefit with a fixed payment, but doesn’t change the tax system in anyway. In a realistic UBI experiment small income would be taxed more than now. Not sure what is the point of the experiment, on one hand it’s certainly better something is being done instead of nothing, but I don’t think there’s much practical benefit from this kind of experiment. One could think it’s like a stalling tactic, waiting 2 years for this instead of actually implementing a sensible reform of our welfare systems.
The full interviews with Tapani Karvinen and with Petrus Pennanen will be published here at Basic Income News shortly.
[photo caption]
Tapani Karvinen on the right, Petrus Pennanen on the left. Photo is taken from a video provided from The Pirate Party of Finland.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland.
![SPAIN [Basque Country]: Political party Elkarrekin Podemos defends basic income in upcoming elections](https://i0.wp.com/basicincome.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Maria-and-Julen.jpg?resize=1%2C1&ssl=1)
by Andre Coelho | Sep 23, 2016 | News
Next Sunday, the 25th of September, will be election day in the Basque Country (regional elections). Because of this, political parties have been frantically campaigning over the last few days—including, especially, the Elkarrekin Podemos, which holds basic income in its political program.
Party leaders like Maria Pilar Artano and Julen Bollain Urbieta take the basic income proposal very seriously, and their efforts to promote it have been supported by Daniel Raventós, president of Red Renta Básica (BIEN’s Spanish affiliate).
If elected, the overall plan will be to launch a large scale debate on basic income in the region, over the first year of legislature. This could be a crucial step to allow the idea to gain traction among the population, paving the way for a regional referendum to be held at the end of that period. In the words of Julen Bollain:
“The Basque population will be the one deciding whether they want the implementation of an Unconditional Basic Income in their region or not. If the result is positive, there nothing else to say. Let’s go for it!”
In this context, the debate has already started. On the 12th of September, a talk dedicated to basic income – which brought together keynote speakers as Nagua Alba, Daniel Raventós, Tinixara Guanche and Julen Bollain – received the attention of the local television station.
More information at:
Elkarrekin Podemos electoral program
