by Toru Yamamori | Oct 7, 2015 | News
Jaemyoung Lee, Mayor of Seongnam City, announced to implement Youth Dividend at a press conference on the first day of October 2015. He informed the purpose, goal and way of Youth Dividend, and proposed that the national government should implement it as well.
Every person aged 19-24 who has lived at the city at least for three years will receive kw 250,000 (about $ 230) quarterly (total kw 1,000,000 a year) without any means-test or work requirement. In this sense, Youth Dividend aims to realize the basic income idea which is different to the previous selected welfare policy, although its amount is very small.
This scheme will be implemented year by year from 24s, because the city has not sufficient fund. According to the statistics, there are about 70,000 aged 19-24 having lived at least for three years and among them 24s are 11,300. So more than kw 60 bn budget will be required to pay kw 1,000,000 to everyone aged 19-24. The city has a plan to carry it out optimizing the budget.
Youth Dividend has two fold goals. It has aims to “expand the welfare for the young people so that they could have more opportunities for raising their qualification” and to “stimulate the local economy by the way of paying Youth Dividend in electronic money which could be only used within the city.”
This scheme has another effect as well. Criticizing President Park’s ‘Hopeful Fund for the Youth’ which is regarded as a philanthropic disguise, Mayor Lee proposed “the central government should adapt Youth Dividend to resolve the so called youth problem fundamentally.”
Korean government pushes ahead with Hopeful Fund for the Youth to conduct practical education for the young people who want to get a job or run their own business through the citizen’s donation. Mayor Lee sharply criticized it, because it gives up the responsibility of government. “The youth problem cannot be resolved by the philanthropic donation”, he said. And “the central government has responsibility to take care of it for the continuous development of the society.”
Two issues, the limitation of regional government budget and the tax justice, are behind his claim that the national government should take Youth Dividend as its program. Mayor Lee said “we should assure the money on the ground of strict tax justice” for resolving the youth problem. For example, if we raise the current rate of 22 percent of corporate tax to 25 percent, we could have a considerable amount of money. Indeed, Korean government has lowered the rate of corporate tax in past years.
There need to pass through another two processes to implement actually Youth Dividend. On the one hand, Seongnam City has to make “an arrangement” with the Ministry of Health and Welfare and on the other hand, the statute of Youth Dividend should be passed in the city council. Seongnam City applied an arrangement with the Ministry on the 24th September and made pre-announcement of legislation of ‘Youth Dividend Statute’ on the 29th.
The reason that Seongnam City has to have an arrangement with Ministry of Health and Welfare is because Article 26 of Social Security Act in Korea regulates the related process. According to it, any regional government which has a plan to make a new social welfare scheme or to change the current programs has to make an arrangement with the Ministry. But the Ministry has de facto power to permit, although the Act contains the expression, “arrangement.” We have lots of cases in which welfare programs in regional government could not be carried out face with the Ministry’s opposition.
So we are afraid of the arrangement process, because current Korean government is so authoritarian and neoliberal. But if the process will be completed as we wish, we have an opportunity to realize the basic income idea here in Korea, even though not sufficient.
[Written by Seonmi Park in Korean and translated by Hyosang Ahn (Both are members of Basic Income Korean Network)]
by BIEN | Jul 6, 2015 | News
On June 19 and 20, basic income activists from around the world met in Seoul to discuss the prospects of future basic income programs and the results from recent experiments. In South Korea, an unconditional basic income is only embraced by members of academia, Green Party Chairman Kim Jho Kwang-soo, and the mayor of Seongnam, Jae-myung Lee, but public support is growing for a youth dividend based on the basic income. At the conference, Tsinghua University professor Cui Zhiyuan expressed a belief that China could eventually adopt a universal basic income and that such an action was necessary to guarantee China remains a “social country”. Sarath Davala, author of Basic Income: A Transformative Policy for India, also reported that a pilot program testing out the basic income in India was a success, reducing debt for families and increasing the time children, especially girls, spent in school.
For more information on International Congress on Basic Income in Korea, see:
International Congress on Basic Income in Korea
by Karl Widerquist | Jul 5, 2015 | News
The Basic Income Youth Network and Green Party in Korea will start “Basic Income Nationwide Tour” on July 6th. Tour continues for 2 weeks, departing from Jeju Island and visiting Jeolla-do, Gyeongsang-do, Chungcheong-do regions of Korea. This tour is aiming to introduce basic income to people all over the country and collect various opinions about basic income from different people of ages and regions.
In March, the Korean Green Party adopted basic income in their party platform. And in June the city of Seoungnam-si announced that it is considering optional basic income, ‘youth income’, as a new policy. Under these circumstances, the tour will help develop a Korean form of basic income and could be the cue for nationwide networking about basic income.
The tour contains various programs such as street campaigns, basic income movie screenings, conferences, open lectures, interviews and so on. Results will be published on the official blog and Internet media Pressian.
For more information see the following websites.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Jan 7, 2013 | Opinion
BIEN now stands for ‘Basic Income Earth Network’. Once every two years BIEN holds a congress, and this year’s showed just how appropriate the name now is and how inappropriate it would be to still call it the ‘Basic Income European Network’. There were participants from South Africa, Namibia, India, Japan, South Korea, the United States, Canada, Latin America, and numerous European countries. Over three hundred in all gathered for forty-eight hours of plenary sessions, workshops and panels: often six different workshops and panels at one time, with three or four speakers each, to enable all of the papers to be delivered and discussed.
The congress was titled ‘Pathways to a Basic Income’. There was a sort of pattern to the timetable. Friday’s sessions were largely on the current state of the debate, Saturday on routes towards implementation of a Citizen’s Income, and Sunday on a Citizen’s Income’s relationships with such vital themes as ecology, rights, justice, and democracy: but nothing is that tidy, and each day contained a wide diversity of presentations and discussions touching on all of those areas.
The high point was a set of presentations by Guy Standing and representatives of India’s Self Employed Workers Association on the Indian Universal Cash Transfers pilot project and on some of the interim results. Of all of the sessions that I attended this one got by far the longest applause. The other high point, though a rather lower key presentation, was the significant story of Iran’s Citizen’s Income told by Hamid Tabatabai during one of the panel sessions.
The Congress was a quite inspiring mixture of the visionary and the realistic, of the broad-brush and the detailed, of the theoretical and the practical, and Germany’s Netzwerk Grundeinkommen (Basic Income Network) is to be congratulated on organising such a highly successful event.
by BIKN Korea | Jun 6, 2011 | News
Seoul, on June 3, 2011, the Basic Income Korean Network(BIKN), in conjunction with Cultural Action and the Institute of Land and Liberty, held a symposium titled Ecology, Land Tax, Culture, and Basic Income as a part of the 5th Marx Communale that took place in Seoul National University.
Part I of the symposium, Culture Society and Basic Income, began with the presentation of Basic Income, a Virtuous Circle of Labor and Culture by Prof. Kwang-Hyun Shim of Korea National University of Arts. Despite admitting that basic income is the only perceived medium of making a radical change in an ever-automating society, Shim argued that an incomplete implementation of basic income – one without a strong, organized cultural movement – is risky, since it might merely augment market fundamentalism by granting more purchasing power. Debated topics included how basic income will/should change the boundary of labor and creative activity.
Part II (Ecology, Land Tax, and Basic Income) approached one of the most notorious social problems of South Korea – the land price. Begun with a presentation titled Ecological Society and Basic Income by Prof. Jeong-Im Kwon of the University of Seoul, it proceeded to the argument for land value taxation by Gi-Up Nam, president of the Institute of Land and Liberty. Laying a moral and economic foundation to taxing one of the largest unearned income in South Korea, Nam claimed the scheme to be an alternative to basic income. Nam-Hoon Kang, professor of economics at Hanshin University and the representative of BIKN, asserted a model where the positive effects of land value taxation and basic income is seamlessly combined, simply by funding basic income with land value taxation.
The event was a success, with the venue packed by an eager audience for five hours. Marx Communale is a biennial academic festival held by South Korean researchers and artists studying various theories originated by Karl Marx. The fifth Communale, Contemporary Capitalism and Life, was a three-day event from June 2 to June 4.
-Report by Han Don-Son, for the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN)
