Mike Danson (p)

Dimitris Ballas

Citizen’s basic income (BI) seeks to reduce poverty and increase people’s control over their lives – improving their quality of life and wellbeing and strengthening socio-economic inclusion and justice. International BI pilots have shown considerable social, economic, administrative benefits. Analyses of these, and persistent poverty, income and job insecurity are leading to growing global interest in BI, with many pilot schemes across the world.
To determine whether the introduction of BI in Scotland would contribute to realising the vision of Scotland 2030 as a better place for all citizens, pilots are being proposed by 4 local authorities with their feasibility studies being supported by the Scottish Government.
This paper will report on a related project which aims to facilitate:
• multi-disciplinary and cross-sector learning about BI
• development, implementation and evaluation of BI pilots in Scotland, with toolkits and evaluation guidance co-produced for critical assessment
• new BI-related research
• a multi-disciplinary and cross-sector Scottish BI network to support learning and inform future policy and practice.
Researchers, policymakers, practitioners and citizens are being brought together in interactive workshops to critically explore rationales, requirements and consequences of BI in Scotland, focusing on how BI interacts with key socio-economic issues including:
• human rights and equality, especially gender, age and disability
• caring
• affordable housing
• employment and entrepreneurship.
This paper will report on progress on this project, offer access to the initial scoping papers and the co-produced outputs from the workshops as a prelude to conclusions and recommendations being disseminated to wider practice and research communities across Scotland and internationally.

Lianne Hans, Arjen Edzes (p), Viktor Venhorst

Mike Danson

This paper summarizes early findings from the social assistance experiment in Groningen which started in November 2017. The aim of this experiment with the Participation Law is to investigate the effects on reintegration, social participation and well-being if social assistance recipients are given more trust by setting fewer rules, giving an extra financial stimulus or intensive tailored supervision. The main focus of the paper is on who said yes to participation and to which intervention. What type of welfare recipients are there? How are participants different from non-participants and are there differences between participants? Are different participants motivated for different interventions? This will be done by regarding objective characteristics such as age, gender and nationality in combination with more soft features such as psychological and social characteristics. Hence, as current research on exit rates from welfare or the effect of certain welfare reforms generally treats welfare recipients as a homogeneous group, at the most making a distinction on based on age or duration of welfare dependence, the main aim of this paper is to shed a light on the heterogeneity of welfare recipients in the Netherlands.

Dimitris Ballas (p), Manos Matsaganis , Anastasia Panori

Arjen Edzes

A basic income (also known as universal basic income) is an income paid unconditionally to every citizen or resident of a country. It is a form of guaranteed minimum income, but distinct from minimum incomes that exist in some countries because it is paid irrespective of income from other sources without a requirement to work. It is often argued that the origins of the idea date back to 18th century and the work of Thomas Paine who advocated the creation of a social insurance scheme for the aged and for young people just starting out in life, which would be paid from a national fund accumulated for this purpose. In recent years there has been a relatively small but rapidly growing number of academic scholars and social activists who have been advocating Basic Income policies and there is currently a lively debate on its feasibility and desirability. There has also been an implementation of relevant policy initiatives, trials and experiments across the world with recent efforts in Finland and Canada amongst the most notable examples, but also the on-going social assistance experiments conducted by several Dutch municipalities and discussions of a possible adoption of Basic Income in Scotland.

Although there has been a considerable number of relevant feasibility studies, there has been very limited analysis of the possible spatial implications of such policies. This paper presents a spatial microsimulation framework for the analysis of the social and spatial impacts of Basic income policies in Greece, building on recent relevant work on the analysis of multidimensional poverty and income inequality in the city of Athens (Panori et al., 2017). In particular, we use a spatial microsimulation that combines small-area demographic and socio-economic information available from the Greek census of population with data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The model is based on an iterative proportional fitting (IPF) algorithm, and is used to reweight EU-SILC records to fit in small-area descriptions for Athens based on 2001 and 2011 censuses. This is achieved by using demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as constraint variables. The model is used to simulate the socio-economic and spatial impacts of alternative basic income policy scenarios. It also offers a detailed discussion of the potential of spatial microsimulation and other social simulation modelling methods for socio-spatial policy analysis.