by Kate McFarland | Jul 29, 2016 | Research
Vijay Joshi, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, has recently published a new book, India’s Long Road: The Search for Prosperity, in which he argues in favor of a basic income for all citizens of India.
From the product description at Amazon.com:
Vijay Joshi argues that the foundations of rapid, durable and inclusive economic growth in India are distinctly shaky. He lays out a penetrating analysis of the country’s recent faltering performance, set against the backdrop of its political economy and charts the course it should follow to achieve widely shared prosperity.
Joshi argues that for India to realize its huge potential, the relation among the state, the market and the private sector must be comprehensively realigned. Deeper liberalization is very necessary but far from sufficient. The state needs to perform much more effectively many core tasks that belong squarely in its domain. His radical reform model includes a fiscally affordable scheme to provide a regular ‘basic income’ for all citizens that would speedily abolish extreme poverty.
Joshi’s research interests are in macroeconomics, international economics, and development economics. Outside of his appointment at Oxford, he has held various positions in government and business offices; for example, he has served as the Officer on Special Duty in India’s Ministry of Finance, the Director of J. P. Morgan’s Indian Investment Trust, an adviser to the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and a consultant to international organizations including the World Bank and the OECD.
Bibliographical entry:
Vijay Joshi, India’s Long Road: The Search for Prosperity, Oxford University Press, 2016.
Reviews focusing on Joshi’s support of basic income:
Ishan Bakshi, “Oxford’s Joshi proposes basic income for all,” Business Standard, July 19, 2016.
Jaimini Bhagwati, “Scrutinising India’s Economic Past Can Guide Us to a Brighter Future,” The Wire, July 20, 2016.
“Govt should wind up subsidies and provide basic income to everyone: Joshi,” WebIndia 123, July 15, 2016.
Photo credit: Chatham House (December 2012)
Thanks, as always, to my supporters on Patreon!
by Kate McFarland | Jul 24, 2016 | News
Eric Walberg is a Canadian journalist who specializes in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia, and has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s.
Last May, he published two articles related to basic income, which are available on his website:
1. “Basic Income: Helicopter money“* (May 26)
This article makes an argument for a guaranteed annual income (GAI) in Canada as a way of abolishing poverty. Referencing Evelyn Forget, he suggests a GAI of $18,000: if a Canadian has no other money, the state will issue them a GAI of $18,000 in full; however, the amout of the supplement would taper off with additional earned income, with a “break even” point around $30,000.
“Basic Income – International experience (Brazil, Namibia, Canada, India)” (May 31)
This article reviews the results of basic income trials in Canada (1974-9), Namibia (2008), and India (2011) (and, briefly, Brazil’s cash-transfer program, Bolsa Familia) — noting, for instance, that the trials provide strong counter-evidence to the common concern that, with a basic income, people will stop working or spend their money unwisely.
* While Walberg’s argument for GAI is well worth reading, it’s important to point out that the title of the article is misleading, as is a sentence in the first paragraph.
Two points of clarification:
• The term ‘basic income’ usually refers to unconditional or universal basic income (UBI), which is not the same as GAI. A UBI is not means-tested; for example, the $18,000 subsidy would go to all Canadians, regardless of other income, if it were a UBI.
When Walberg cites a cost of $12 billion, this is the cost of “topping up” the incomes of Canadians to a level high enough to get the unemployed and low-earners out of poverty — not the cost of providing every Canadian with $18,000 per annum.
• Neither ‘basic income’ nor ‘guaranteed annual income’ should be used synonymously with ‘helicopter money’. Helicopter money — the printing of new money to be distributed directly to individuals or households — is one possible way to finance a basic income. It has been supported recently by American investor Bill Gross and the European group Quantitative Easing for the People, among others. However, many supporters of a basic income (of GAI) do not favor the printing of new money; more commonly, in fact, their proposals rest on the redistribution of existing income.
by Michael Lytton | Jul 12, 2016 | News
Abhijit V. Banerjee. Credit to: Financial Times
On June 18, The Indian Express—an English-language daily newspaper, published an article about the Swiss vote on UBI. The piece titled “The best way to welfare,” was written by Abhijit V. Banerjee, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (His book—co-authored by Esther Duflo—Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award)
Banerjee says that although the Swiss voted against a universal basic income, polls conducted after the referendum suggest that the debate is not over. He gives two reasons, the first being the widespread concern, especially in the West, about the future of work. An increasing topic of concern is that absent a radical reassessment of the fundamentals of how our economy works, there could be an enormous population of permanently unemployed whose jobs have become superfluous by automated and intelligent machines.
Banerjee then says the UBI debate is still alive because our current welfare systems are fragmented, bureaucratic and overly complicated. He reminds readers that reshaping its social security system is the primary purpose of Finland’s basic income experiment, scheduled to take place in 2017–2018, an experiment he says that is ‘clearly relevant’ for India.
For more information on the Finland experiment, read the Basic Income News reports listed below.
Banerjee cites Renana Jhabvala, an Indian social worker who gained prominence through her work on behalf of women in the informal economy, and, with Guy Standing among others, co-edited Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India (published by Bloomsbury in 2014). The book reports on the results of three basic income schemes piloted in India between 2010 and 2013, in which 6,000 individuals received completely unconditional monthly cash payments. The book was reported in a Basic Income News item, December 8, 2014.
A summary of results of the project was released on the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) website. On the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) website, Guy Standing reports on the main outcomes of the social experiment. The UNRISD also hosted a seminar on May 13th 2016, titled “Informality and Income Insecurity: Is Basic Income a Universal Solution?”. Seven speakers are also featured in videos as part of this event.
Jhabvala estimates that there are more than 350 separate welfare programs in the India. “Why not,” says Banerjee, “have one universal basic subsidy that covers everything (perhaps except health and education) and let people decide how they will spend it, rather than trying to target subsidies based on our imperfect knowledge of what people need and deserve?”
Credit to: Give Directly
The immediate benefits are reduced poverty and less red tape, enabling the bureaucracy to be deployed elsewhere. And potentially the poor might use their financial security to plan their lives more effectively and invest in their families and businesses.
Finally, Banerjee mentions another pilot project, announced in April 2016 by the NGO GiveDirectly, that will test a universal basic income in Kenya. The plan is to provide at least 6,000 Kenyans with a basic income for 10 to 15 years. The parameters of the study are that it generates unbiased and transparent estimates of impact, that it is a long-term commitment, and that it is operationalized within well-defined communities. Banerjee is among a group of academic researchers who will test the impacts of the experiment.
More information at:
Stanislas Jourdan, “FINLAND: Government Forms Research Team to Design Basic Income Pilots,” October 15th 2015.
Vito Laterza, “FINLAND: Basic income experiment – what we know”, December 9th 2015.
Tyler Prochazka, “Dylan Matthews, ‘Finland’s hugely exciting experiment in basic income, explained”, December 13th 2015.
Kate McFarland, “FINLAND: KELA has sent preliminary report to Prime Minister”, April 5th 2016
Give Directly website
Wikipedia, “Renana Jhabvala“, 16th May 2016
Wikipedia, “Abhijit Banerjee“, 20th May 2016
Wikipedia, “Poor Economics“, 26th March 2016
by Kate McFarland | Jul 1, 2016 | News
Varun Gandhi, Member of Parliament of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has endorsed basic income in an article published in The Hindu on June 30, 2016. The BJP, the ruling party in India, is the largest political party in not only India but (as of March 2015) the world, with 88 million registered members.
In his article, Gandhi calls for more basic income studies to be conducted in India, and delineates an impressive list of benefits that he expects from the policy:
A regular unconditional basic income, scaled up through pilots, and rolled out slowly and carefully, seems ideal for India. It can help improve living conditions including sanitation in our villages, providing them with access to better drinking water, while improving children’s nutrition. Regular basic income payments can help institute rational responses to illness or hunger, enabling households to fund their health expenses instead of encountering a vicious cycle of debt. It can help reduce child labour, while facilitating an increase in school spending. It can transform villages, enabling the growth of productive work, leading to a sustained increase in income. It could cut inequality; grow the economy; all while offering the pursuit of happiness.
Varun Gandhi has nearly 270,000 followers on Twitter and over 3 million Facebook fans.
Feroze Varun Gandhi, “Why we need to talk about a basic income,” The Hindu, July 1, 2016.
Image from Varun Gandhi’s life in pics (NDTV)
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by Kate McFarland | Jun 27, 2016 | Research
Rasmus Schjoedt is the Social Policy Specialist at Development Pathways, a UK-based consultancy firm that “brings together a group of social policy experts with extensive international experience of working on social protection, social development, gender, financial inclusion, and livelihoods.”
Development Pathways states that its vision is the “global adoption of transformative social and economic policies that guarantee the realisation of the rights for all,” and its mission is to “provide creative evidence based and context specific solutions to social and economic policy challenges.”
Schjoedt wrote the April 25, 2016 edition of the Pathways’ Perspective blog on the topic of basic income experiment conducted in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh from 2011 to 2012.
Despite a short implementation period and relatively low benefit levels, the effects were impressive: by the end of the project it was possible to see significant improvements in living conditions, nutrition and education.
With almost half of the world’s poorest living in India, how the country approaches social protection in the coming years will be very important for the global efforts to eliminate extreme poverty by 2030. A universal basic income could be an important part of the solution.
Schjoedt describes the experiment and its results in some detail in a paper available for download here.
Reference
Rasmus Schjoedt, “India’s Basic Income Experiment,” Pathways’ Perspectives, April 25, 2016.
Image Source: Yann via Wikimedia Commons
