Taiwan holds first online basic income summit

Taiwan holds first online basic income summit

After over a year of avoiding significant local COVID outbreaks, Taiwan experienced a scare in May with hundreds of cases emerging. This brought the idea of universal cash payments to the forefront of Taiwan’s political debate as millions of jobs were destabilized overnight.

With this backdrop, UBI Taiwan held its first-ever online basic income summit on August 15, inviting professors, activists, and politicians from around the world to discuss the state of basic income during the COVID pandemic.

Korea’s Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung opened the summit by noting the importance of the basic income movement in Korea and Taiwan. Lee is currently a frontrunner in the early stages of Korea’s presidential race. He has been called the “Bernie Sanders of Korea” because of his economic proposals.

“When the world is implementing expansive fiscal policy, basic income is gaining attention as the most rational and remarkable way to prepare for the era of the fourth industrial revolution,” Lee said in his address to the conference.

As the former mayor of Seongnam, Lee started a youth basic income program for all 24-year-old youth in the city to receive local currency every quarter. The scheme was shown to improve small business activity in the region. He later expanded the program to the province when he became governor.

Kim Kyeong Soo is part of the Gyeonggi provincial government vision planner. He is the planner of the provincial youth basic income program.

“What we are doing at our expense is to realize the basic social rights of young people,” Kim said in an interview for the conference.

This was a useful model during the COVID crisis because the provincial government was able to quickly expand the program to include all residents of the province during the economic downturn.

Kim also discussed how they increased a myriad of programs during the COVID pandemic and the plans to push for basic income on a nationwide scale.

“We designed it so that it could only be used in stores with annual sales of 1.2 billion won or less, so that the money could be actually revitalized for the small business owners of the real alley economy,” Kim said.

Members of the Basic Income Korea Network Mok Hwakyun and Kim Jae-seop attended the summit for the question-and-answer session. They noted how basic income has become a mainstream topic in Korea.

“The biggest change is that everyone knows about basic income now,” Mok said. “I hope Korea will be the first country” to implement UBI.

Prominent US activist Scott Santens gave a pre-recorded interview for the conference where he discussed the success and failures of America’s massive COVID relief program. One of the biggest changes that has emerged is the Child Tax Credit, which Santens said he believes will get more people on board with a wider basic income safety net.  

“I feel hopeful that especially the monthly CTC is going to really change things here and help build momentum for a full UBI here in the US,” Santens said.

Taiwan’s Yangming University Professor Song-Lih Huang discussed the debate between Universal Basic Services compared to basic income. He concluded that UBS does not provide the same level of individual freedom as UBI.

UBI Taiwan Chairman Tyler Prochazka evaluated Taiwan’s COVID relief response and noted the inadequacy and complexity of receiving relief.

The situation became more severe this past May when a local outbreak caused Taiwan to go into level 3 lockdown for the first time during the pandemic. Taiwan is experiencing a bizarre contradiction, where record economic growth is fueled by its strong export sector despite the lockdown for other industries. At the same time, the lockdown has caused Taiwan’s employees to experience their worst economic situation in decades, particularly for the service industry.

As a result of the lockdown, half of Taiwanese experienced wage reductions of 10 to 50 percent, and 74 percent reported some reduction in wages. At the same time, 41 percent said they believed the government’s COVID relief program provided no help. One issue with the relief program is it relies on extensive documentation to prove an individual’s circumstance and can also reject an applicant if a household member has too much money in the bank.

For example, Taiwan’s unemployment had reached 570,000 people and the number experiencing lower than normal working hours had reached nearly one million during the lockdown. However, only 20,000 people were added to unemployment benefits during June which is less than one-fourth of the increased unemployment for that period.  

Level two lockdown has been extended until September 6 in Taiwan, which places varying levels of restrictions on how businesses operate and closes some businesses entirely, such as certain entertainment venues. Even as much of the country returns to normal, many businesses will likely experience continued restrictions on their operations as well as reduced demand for the foreseeable future.

Despite one of the worst employment situations in decades for Taiwan, the government has only allocated around 6 percent of its annual GDP on COVID relief this year. Compared to Japan and the United States, which spent between 16 to 30 percent of their GDPs on COVID relief, Taiwan has given significantly less to its citizens as a developed economy.

Taiwan’s ruling party Democratic Progressive Party is moving toward another round of stimulus coupons worth 5,000 NT ($180 USD). Due to the stringent conditions associated with COVID relief programs, the universal coupons are the most accessible program from the government’s COVID response for many families. There has been a strong push by opposition parties in Taiwan to provide cash relief now for most Taiwanese instead of coupons and use the administrative savings to give an additional cash boost to poor households.

“Taiwan’s ruling party said they want to ‘share economic growth’ with all Taiwanese,” Prochazka said. “The real way to share economic growth is with Universal Basic Income.”

Portugal: Conference on pilot projects in July

Portugal: Conference on pilot projects in July

From the 1st to the 3rd of July, 2020, at the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal), a conference on Basic Income experiments will occur, focused on its political and social policy implications. From the conference website it can be read:

The debate about basic income requires our attention, especially when a growing number of countries and cities are conducting experiments to test out new schemes of cash transfer. This conference aims to evaluate experiments from both normative and empirical perspectives, drawing on the insights of philosophy, political science, and economics, amongst others. It seeks to bring together those who are engaged in experiments both at a theoretical and practical levels to foster the debate between those involved in designing and implementing pilots with scholars in the fields of political philosophy, social sciences and policy analysis. We are particularly interested in assessing the political and the philosophical implications of these pilots and their results, the nature of those experiments, the epistemic status of the data and the impacts it generates, the manner in which the results can be translated into a real policy, to what extent they might inform other social policies, and which are the main limitations and challenges when conducting them.

The call for papers is online. Confirmed speakers include Guy Standing, Jamie Cooke, Rebecca Hasdell, Stuart White, Juliana Bidadanure and Karl Widerquist.

The conference will include a Book Symposium on Karl Widerquist, 2018’s book, A Critical Analysis of Basic Income Experiments for Researchers, Policymakers, and Citizens. If you would like to participate in that symposium or the conference in general, contact the organizers, Roberto Merrill at: nrbmerrill@gmail.com and Bru Laín Scandell at: bgrafic@gmail.com.

Kela Conference on Social Security 2019 – Equality and wellbeing through sustainable social security system

Kela Conference 2019 will occur on the 10th December 2019, between 9.00 and 16.30h, at Kela’s Main office building in Helsinki. It will be a gathering of experts on social protection, and will include four main themes – Investing in the future, Reforming social security, Customer services in the globalizing and diversifying world and Customer experience by digital transformation.

The main idea behind the Conference is to think about a social security system for Finland which can face the challenges of the present and future in a sustainable way. Issues with delivering wellbeing and usage of artificial intelligence to distributing benefits are important aspects to consider in an ever-increasing globalized and diverse social world.

Signing up for the event can be done here, up until the 3rd of December 2019. Keynotes can be watched online (streamed), without registration.

More information at:

Kela Conference 2019 webpage

Reykjavik, Iceland: International Conference of Europeanist – Panel on Politics of Universal Basic Income

Reykjavik, Iceland: International Conference of Europeanist – Panel on Politics of Universal Basic Income

A panel on Politics of Universal Basic Income is being summoned at the next 27th International Conference of Europeanists, which will be held in Reykjavik (Iceland), on the 22-24th of June 2020. For that purpose, a Call for Papers has been launched, and submissions are being accepted up until the 10th of October, according to these instructions.

In this panel, there is an interest in empirical studies that look at the social and political processes surrounding UBIs discussions, including pilot test and experiment designs and implementations, either at the local, national or supranational level, in Europe and elsewhere.

The specific panel is being orgazined by César Guzmán-Concha (Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow, Université de Genève; Visiting Fellow, European University Institute)

Cryptocurrencies: GoodDollar – The first blockchain-related UBI conference talk

Cryptocurrencies: GoodDollar – The first blockchain-related UBI conference talk

Yoni Assia. Picture credit to: CCN

The recent international basic income conference “Visions for a Brighter Future,” UBI-Nordic 2019 was held in Oslo from April 5–7; at it, Nir Yaacobi and Gilad Barner became the first representatives of a universal basic income (UBI)-related blockchain project to present at a UBI conference. Their not-for-profit research organization, GoodDollar, aims to develop an open-source method for implementing UBI through blockchain. Blockchain technology was popularized by cryptocurrencies, but is, in general terms, a distributed ledger (i.e., a database hosted by numerous servers rather than one central authority) where all transactions are verified publicly, rather than being controlled by a single administrator. Blockchain protocols can allow for the execution of smart contracts, or an encoded agreement that auto-executes once its terms are fulfilled. Due to the nature of the type of encryption that blockchain uses, each encrypted transaction includes information from the one that occurs before it, making transactions, once verified, theoretically impossible to change or erase. Some blockchain projects, like GoodDollar, aim to eventually create Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) that eschew classical governance for a public, distributed, social and financial system based on blockchain.

The idea of GoodDollar was born over ten years ago in a paper called “The Visible Hand,” which outlined a framework for a monetary system where smaller investments are granted the same interest rates as larger ones in order to combat extreme wealth inequality. The organization’s current mission is to “build open-source solutions for efficient allocation of resources according to principles informed by research on UBI and related policy proposals.”

Other UBI-related blockchain and cryptocurrency initiatives reported by Basic Income News have included SwiftDemand, Grantcoin, and a BitNation exploration of the concept of UBI and cryptocurrency.

More information at:

Yoni Assia and Omri Ross, “Good Dollar Experiment: Wealth Distribution Position Paper,” July 11th 2018

Yoni Assia, “Good Dollar – The Visible Hand,” November 28th 2008

Cameron McLeod, “BitNation: Recent Advances in Cryptocurrency See Basic Income Tested,” March 30th 2017

UBI-Nordic, “Basic Income: ‘Visions for a Brighter Future’ UBI-Nordic 2019—Oslo, April 5–7”, Accessed May 13th 2019