IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bdc/wpaper/393.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Minimum Income Guarantee amidst Joblessness & Vulnerability: A Design for Income Transfers Post-Covid 19 and beyond

Author

Listed:
  • Santosh Mehrotra
  • Anjana Rajagopalan
  • Rakesh Ranjan Kumar

Abstract

Amidst the bleak picture of increasing joblessness and indebtedness presented by the National Sample Survey's employment surveys and debt surveys, a minimum standard of living for the nation's poor seems to be under threat. In response to this, recent schemes inspired by the Universal Basic Income debates appeared to have been designed more for political considerations, and have glaring identification issues and have been exclusionary. Rather than adopting a quasi-UBI as suggested in the Economic Survey of 2017 and doing away with many existing developmental programmes, this paper makes a case for, and presents the design of, a much better method targeting of transfers as a supplement, keeping fiscal as well as labour-market outcomes in mind. The sudden exogenous shock of COVID-19 to the incomes of the poor has made the case of a minimum income guarantee (MIG) for the poor more urgent. Had a MIG already been in place by early 2020, it would only have required a ramping up of the transfers to protect the incomes of the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Santosh Mehrotra & Anjana Rajagopalan & Rakesh Ranjan Kumar, 2020. "A Minimum Income Guarantee amidst Joblessness & Vulnerability: A Design for Income Transfers Post-Covid 19 and beyond," Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) Working Paper 393, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), New Delhi, India.
    • Handle: RePEc:bdc:wpaper:393
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://icrier.org/pdf/Working_Paper_393.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bdc:wpaper:393. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chhaya Singh (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.icrier.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.