Title:	The Feasibility of Citizen’s Income
Authors:	Malcolm Torry Karl Widerquist
Keywords:	Feasibility
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	There is no shortage of debate about the desirability and feasibility of the State paying to every citizen an unconditional regular income. Whether we call it a Basic Income, a Citizen’s Income, or a Universal Basic Income, 1 increasing numbers of individuals, think tanks, and governments are taking the idea seriously. Successful pilot projects have taken place in Namibia and India 2; Iran has found itself with something like a Citizen’s Income 3; and Switzerland is soon to hold a referendum on whether to establish a Citizen’s Income. 4 In the UK, signifi cant think tanks across the political spectrum are conducting their own research on the idea, 5 and at the 2015 General Election the Green Party had a proposal to plan for a Citizen’s Income in its manifesto. 6 It is essential that the increasingly widespread debate should be well informed. There is already a massive Citizen’s Income literature— newspaper and journal articles, website articles, introductions to the subject, reports on pilot projects, and surveys of the state of the debate in different countries and around the world 7 —and the debate is already well informed by detailed studies of aspects of feasibility; 8 but so far we have been lacking a full-length study of a Citizen’s Income’s feasibility. This book seeks to fi ll that gap. Citizen’s Income is a global issue. Thirty years ago, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN) brought together individuals from a variety of European countries in which the Citizen’s Income proposal was being discussed. By the turn of the millennium, it was clear that the movement was becoming global rather than European, so BIEN became BIEN—the Basic Income Earth Network: a rather clumsy name, but nobody wanted to lose the acronym. 9 This book is designed for that global debate. The main body of each chapter is therefore a general discussion of a particular aspect of a Citizen’s Income’s feasibility. This general discussion will apply in any country 10 and in any social and economic context. Each chapter also contains a case study which applies the general points made in the body of the chapter to a particular country’s situation. While the case studies are necessarily about particular situations, it is hoped that readers will be able to adapt them to their own situations, both in broad outline and in detail. Most of the case studies relate to the UK for three reasons: because that is the situation that I know best; because readers might fi nd it helpful to get to know one particular situation well in order to understand how different feasibilities might relate to each other in practice; and because the UK’s current tax and benefi ts system contains all of the elements that are likely to be found in other country’s systems. It would be a pleasure to see similar detailed case studies written for other countries.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/54274
ISBN:	978-1-137-53078-3
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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