IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cai/reldbu/rel_703_369.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Basic income, unemployment and job scarcity

Author

Listed:
  • Loek Groot

Abstract

The main claim of this paper is that in a world of equal entitlements to work rights the justification for a basic income is stronger, and that its level should be higher. the higher the level of unemployment or job scarcity. Point of departure is an economy with job scarcity. A fair way to deal with job scarcity is to grant everybody an equal right to work, where these rights can be freely traded. It turns out that such a Labour Rights scheme and a basic income scheme are equivalent. The equivalence is that the price of Labour Rights and the unemployment benefit corresponds to the income tax rate and basic income respectively. The tax rate can thus be considered as what workers have to pay to appropriate scarce job assets. Both schemes allow that some people voluntarily abstain from doing paid work, in return for a financial compensation. Therefore, the advantages in terms of equity and efficiency of a Labour Rights scheme equally apply to the basic income proposal. This analysis provides an argument against cutting unemployment and social assistance benefits during economic downturns and it offers new insights to evaluate the parasitism and exploitation objection raised against basic income.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Loek Groot, 2004. "Basic income, unemployment and job scarcity," Recherches économiques de Louvain, De Boeck Université, vol. 70(3), pages 369-387.
  • Handle: RePEc:cai:reldbu:rel_703_369
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REL_703_369
    Download Restriction: free

    File URL: http://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-economiques-de-louvain-2004-3-page-369.htm
    Download Restriction: free
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Basic income: some issues
      by chris in Stumbling and Mumbling on 2015-01-27 20:01:38

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marx, Axel & Peeters, Hans, 2008. "An unconditional basic income and labor supply: Results from a pilot study of lottery winners," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 1636-1659, August.
    2. Oana-Valentina Cercelaru, 2016. "Unconditional Basic Income – Impact On The Economy," Annals - Economy Series, Constantin Brancusi University, Faculty of Economics, vol. 3, pages 118-122, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • J21 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Force and Employment, Size, and Structure
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
    • J23 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Labor Demand
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:cai:reldbu:rel_703_369. 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: Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-economiques-de-louvain.htm .

    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.