South Korea: The report on Youth Basic Income in Gyeonggi Province
Gyeonggi Province, Republic of Korea, has been implementing the Youth Basic Income (YBI) programme since April 1, 2019. The English edition of the report on the project was published in July and can be accessed here.
The following is a short introduction by Ikjin Yu, Researcher at Gyeonggi Research Institute, Dept. of Economic & Social Policy.
Gyeonggi Province, Republic of Korea, has been implementing the Youth Basic Income (YBI) programme since April 1, 2019. In December 2020, Gyeonggi Research Institute (GRI), an affiliated organisation of Gyeonggi Province, published a research report (Korean version), focusing on the first year result of the YBI programme. Recently, in July 2021, GRI has published its English version.
This research report mainly consists of quantitative and qualitative analyses.
For quantitative analysis, the experimental group comprised 11,335 recipients who participated in both the ex-ante and ex-post surveys, whereas the comparison group included 800 respondents who resided in regions other than Gyeonggi Province. There were five categories for analysis such as “happiness”, “health and diet”, “perceptions and attitudes”, “economic activity” and “dream-capital”. The results of the Difference-In-Differences (DID) analysis showed that Gyeonggi YBI positively influenced on their happiness, mental health, workout frequency, diet, perception on gender and equal society, dream-capital, economic activity, time use and so forth.
For qualitative analysis, participants of individual interviews and focus group interviews (FGI) were variously grouped by detailed category. It was conducted on 24-year-olds residing in Gyeonggi Province only who received four rounds of Gyeonggi YBI. A total of 42 participated in the individual interviews and the FGIs. The analysis shows many things regarding Gyeonggi 24-year-olds’ perception of Gyeonggi YBI and basic income itself.
The research report concluded that the Gyeonggi YBI has positively influenced on the 24-year- old youths’ life in various aspects based on the recipients’ experience over the past one year.
