ITSA Newsletter: January 2025

Here’s the latest and biggest Basic Income news:

‣ South Korea could as soon as this year become the first country to adopt UBI

‣ Mark Carney could replace Justin Trudeau which could potentially lead to basic income in Canada in response to AI

‣ A study of a monthly cash program in Brazil has shown it cut tuberculosis rates in half, preventing millions of hospitalizations over two decades

‣ Final results of the 2-Year “Minneapolis Guaranteed Basic Income” pilot released

‣ Final results of the 2-Year “Compton Pledge” pilot released

ITSA News Update:

The Income To Support All Foundation is proud to announce the third UBI project we have chosen to support. It’s called UBIdata. It’s an online knowledge repository focused on systematically collecting, processing, and disseminating key information about basic income pilots, proposals and policy debates around the world. You can think of it as the Our World in Data for universal basic income.

You can visit the website right now where it currently exists in prototype form with data from basic income pilots from six countries around the world, including the US. By the end of the year, this should be expanded to at least 25 countries and many more pilots, and should also be more user-friendly based on user testing and feedback.

UBIdata is a project initiated and coordinated by the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and its main objective is to provide a key resource for policy-makers, researchers, journalists and civil society organizations and advocacy networks interested in understanding, debating and working towards introducing basic income.

If you’d like to support this project or one of our other ambitious UBI projects, consider a donation to ITSA today, or even becoming a monthly donor.

South Korea could as soon as this year become the first country to adopt UBI [link]

• With the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea could soon be required to hold a snap election within a 60-day time span.

• The odds-on favorite to win the snap election is Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party of Korea who lost the previous election by less than 1%.

• Lee Jae-myung is a big supporter of UBI, ran on UBI as a key policy, and the DPK officially added UBI to their party’s platform in August of last year.

Mark Carney could replace Justin Trudeau which could potentially lead to basic income in Canada in response to AI [link]

• With the resignation of Justin Trudeau, Canada’s Liberal Party has begun looking for its next leader.

• Mark Carney is an economist and former head of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England and has quickly become the leading contender.

• Carney has spoken a lot in recent years about the impacts of automation on labor markets and the need for much better social supports in response to AI.

A study of a monthly cash program in Brazil has shown it cut tuberculosis rates in half, preventing millions of hospitalizations over two decades [link]

• Brazil’s Bolsa Familia program provides monthly cash to a quarter of its population, about 21 million families, and has for twenty years.

• A huge new study compared recipients to comparable non-recipients and found a huge reduction in tuberculosis rates of over 50%.

• Study author: "What we are discovering – the more we study – is the effects [of cash transfers] are really strong. It's not just tuberculosis. We have seen it in HIV/AIDS, child mortality, etc. We have a study showing an enormous effect on reduction of hospitalization, or millions of hospitalizations that have been avoided in the last two decades because of the program.”

Final results of the 2-Year Minneapolis Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot released [link]

• Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis released their findings from their 2-year pilot that provided $500/mo to 200 low-income people.

• They found no reduction in employment at all and even a slight increase, albeit not large enough to be statistically significant.

• From the abstract “We find that basic income causes improvements in food security, housing stability, and financial security; has no effect on labor supply; and improves measures of mental health and self-reported well-being while participants are receiving payments.”

Final results of the 2-Year “Compton Pledge” pilot released [link]

• The Compton Pledge provided an average of $450/mo ($300 for one adult and $600 for two adults or more in 374 households) in 2021-2023.

• Researchers found a small reduction in part-time employment with no reduction in full-time employment. Single mothers greatly increased their employment.

• In households where there were men, intimate partner violence plummeted by 36 percentage points.

• The number of cigarette smokers slightly increased but the total amount of cigarette consumption went down overall by $1.95 per month.

• Recipients increased their savings and reduced their debts.

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Scott Santens

Founder & CEO, ITSA Foundation