Calendrier du 14 février 2024
Development Economics Seminar
Du 14/02/2024 de 16:30 à 18:00
R2.01
BANERJEE Abhijit (MIT)
Universal Basic Income: Short-Term Results from a Long-Term Experiment in Kenya
écrit avec Abhijit Banerjee,Michael Faye,Alan Krueger,Paul Niehaus,Tavneet Suri
What would be the consequences of a long-term commitment to provide everyone enough
money to meet their basic needs? We examine this hotly debated issue in the context of a unique
eld experiment in rural Kenya. Communities receiving UBI experienced substantial economic
expansion|more enterprises, higher revenues, costs, and net revenues|and structural shifts,
with the expansion concentrated in the non-agricultural sector. Labor supply did not change
overall, but shifted out of wage employment and towards self-employment. We also compare
the e ects to those of shorter-term transfers delivered either as a stream of small payments
or a large lump sum. The lump sums had similar, if not larger, economic impacts, while the
short-term transfers had noticeably smaller e ects, despite having delivered the same amount
of capital to date. These results are consistent with a simple model of forward-looking lumpy
investment, and more generally with a role for savings constraints, credit constraints, and some
degree of (locally) increasing returns, among other factors.