Guaranteed minimum income (GMI), also called minimum income, is a social-welfare system that guarantees all citizens or families an income sufficient to live on, provided that certain eligibility conditions are met, typically: citizenship and that the person in question does not already receive a minimum level of income to live on.
In international relations, aid is – from the perspective of governments – a voluntary transfer of resources from one country to another.
Poverty reduction, poverty relief, or poverty alleviation is a set of measures, both economic and humanitarian, that are intended to permanently lift people out of poverty.
Gift Aid is a UK tax incentive that enables tax-effective giving by individuals to charities in the United Kingdom. Gift Aid was introduced in the Finance Act 1990 for donations given after 1 October 1990, but was originally limited to cash gifts of £600 or more. This threshold was successively reduced in April 2000 when the policy was substantially revised and the minimum donation limit removed entirely. A similar policy applies to charitable donations by companies that are subject to the UK corporation tax.
Safaricom PLC is a listed Kenyan mobile network operator headquartered at Safaricom House in Nairobi, Kenya. It is the largest telecommunications provider in Kenya, and one of the most profitable companies in the East and Central Africa region. The company offers mobile telephony, mobile money transfer, consumer electronics, ecommerce, cloud computing, data, music streaming, and fibre optic services. It is most renowned as the home of M-PESA, a mobile banking SMS-based service.
Bolsa Família is the current social welfare program of the Government of Brazil, part of the Fome Zero network of federal assistance programs. Bolsa Família provided financial aid to poor Brazilian families. In order to be eligible, families had to ensure that children attend school and get vaccinated. If they exceeded the total of permitted school absences, they were dropped from the program and their funds were suspended. The program attempted to both reduce short-term poverty by direct cash transfers and fight long-term poverty by increasing human capital among the poor through conditional cash transfers. It also worked to give free education to children who couldn't afford to go to school, to show the importance of education. In 2008, The Economist described Bolsa Família as an "anti-poverty scheme invented in Latin America [which] is winning converts worldwide." The program was a centerpiece of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's social policy and is reputed to have played a role in his victory in the general election of 2006. Bolsa Família was the largest conditional cash transfer program in the world, though the Mexican Oportunidades was the first nationwide program of this kind.
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. The government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. CCTs seek to help the current generation in poverty, as well as breaking the cycle of poverty for the next through the development of human capital. Conditional cash transfers could help reduce feminization of poverty.
In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a system which reverses the direction in which tax is paid for incomes below a certain level; in other words, earners above that level pay money to the state while earners below it receive money, as shown by the blue arrows in the diagram. NIT was proposed by Juliet Rhys-Williams while working on the Beveridge Report in the early 1940s and popularized by Milton Friedman in the 1960s as a system in which the state makes payments to the poor when their income falls below a threshold, while taxing them on income above that threshold. Together with Friedman, supporters of NIT also included James Tobin, Joseph A. Pechman, and Peter M. Mieszkowski, Jim Gray and even then-President Richard Nixon, who suggested implementation of modified NIT in his Family Assistance Plan. After the increase in popularity of NIT, an experiment sponsored by the US government was conducted between 1968 and 1982 on effects of NIT on labour supply, income, and substitution effects.
A cash transfer is a direct transfer payment of money to an eligible person. Cash transfers are either unconditional cash transfers or conditional cash transfers. They may be provided by organisations funded by private donors, or a local or regional government.
Universal basic income (UBI) is a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to work. In contrast a guaranteed minimum income is paid only to those who do not already receive an income that is enough to live on. A UBI would be received independently of any other income. If the level is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs, it is sometimes called a full basic income; if it is less than that amount, it may be called a partial basic income. No country has yet introduced either, although there have been numerous pilot projects and the idea is discussed in many countries. Some have labelled UBI as utopian due to its historical origin.
Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is an American development economist currently serving as the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a Berkeley-based hub for research on development economics.
In Brazil, universal basic income has been discussed at least since the 1980s. In 2001 a law was introduced by Senator Eduardo Suplicy of the Brazilian Workers Party which mandated the progressive institution of such a welfare system. By this move Brazil became the first country in the world to pass such a law. Suplicy had previously introduced a bill to create a negative income tax, but that bill failed to pass. The new bill called for a national and universal basic income to be instituted, beginning with those most in need. The bill was approved by the Senate in 2002 and by the Chamber of Deputies in 2003. President Lula da Silva signed it into law in 2004, and according to the bill it is the president's responsibility to gradually implement the reform. Since then Brazil has started to implement the bill through the Bolsa Família program, which was a centerpiece of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's social policy, and is reputed to have played a role in his victory in the Brazilian presidential election, 2006.
Adeso is Nairobi-based humanitarian non-governmental organization.
Universal basic income in India refers to the debate and practical experiments with universal basic income (UBI) in India. The greatest impetus has come from the 40-page chapter on UBI that the Economic Survey of India published in January 2017. It outlined the three themes of a proposed UBI programme:
Unconditional cash transfer (UCT) programs are philanthropic programs aim to reduce poverty by providing financial welfare without any conditions upon the receivers' actions. This differentiates them from conditional cash transfers where the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. Unconditional cash transfers have developed on the premise that giving cash to citizens allows them to have autonomy over their own lives.
Christopher Blattman is a Canadian-American economist and political scientist working on conflict, crime, and international development. He is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies and The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He is active on Twitter as well as an early blogger on international economics and politics. He is the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, published by Viking Press in 2022.
Universal basic income pilots are smaller-scale preliminary experiments which are carried out on selected members of the relevant population to assess the feasibility, costs and effects of the full-scale implementation of universal basic income, or the related concept of negative income tax, including partial universal basic income and similar programs. The following list provides an overview of the most famous universal basic income pilots, including projects which have not been launched yet but have been already approved by the respective political bodies or for the negotiations are in process.
In the realm of humanitarian aid, Cash and Voucher Assistance (CVA) is recognized as an umbrella term for two of the common modalities of assistance for delivering swift and flexible humanitarian aid support to populations affected by various crises, the third being in-kind assistance.
Johannes Haushofer is an economist and professor of economics at the Department of Economics, Stockholm University. He was previously an assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University.
Social Income is a nonprofit organization based in Switzerland that provides unconditional cash transfers via mobile phone to people living in multidimensional poverty in West Africa. Since 2020, Social Income has been running an open-ended universal basic income program in Sierra Leone.
