Aida Martinez Tinaut
Office of the Pilot Project to Implement the UBI in Catalonia
A survey was conducted in Catalonia between September and November 2022 with a total N of 3,098 which showed, among many other interesting findings, that the general catalan opinion supports the implementation of a Universal Basic Income, being the average support of 6.5.
Figure 1 shows that the support for UBI implementation is horizontal and quite high across all the parties for which the respondents have sympathy. Only two political parties gather respondents’ sympathy and the level of support for UBI implementation is below 5: PP (Popular Party) and Vox, the former being conservative and the latter being far-right.
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The fatal flaw with this type of opinion survey is that it lacks context on the cost of a UBI, how it will impact the tax burdens of the public, and how it might compromise the provision of major in-kind benefit programs. For a detailed analysis of this issue and empirical evidence, see chapter 21 (“Public Support for a Basic Income”} in the monograph “Basic Income and a Just Society,” published in 2023 by Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal.