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An accessible introduction to the simple (yet radical) premise that a small cash income, sufficient for basic needs, ought to be provided regularly and unconditionally to every citizen.The growing movement for universal basic income (UBI) has been gaining attention from politics and the media with the audacious idea of a regular, unconditional cash grant for everyone as a right of citizenship. This volume in the Essential Knowledge series presents the first short, solid UBI introduction that is neither academic nor polemic. It takes a position in favor of UBI, but its primary goal remains the provision of essential knowledge by answering the fundamental questions about it: What is UBI? How does it work? What are the arguments for and against it? What is the evidence?Karl Widerquist discusses how UBI functions, showing how it differs from other redistributional approaches. He summarizes the common arguments for and against UBI and presents the reasons for believing it is a tremendously important reform. The book briefly discusses the likely cost of UBI; options for paying for it; the existing evidence on the probable effects of UBI; and the history of UBI from its inception more than two hundred years ago through the two waves of support it received in the twentieth century to the third and largest wave of support it is experiencing now. Now more than ever, conditions in much of the world are ripe for such enthusiasm to keep growing, and there are good reasons to believe that this current wave of support will eventually lead to the adoption of UBI in several countries around the world—making this volume an especially timely and necessary read.

This book provides a general framework for the use of theoretical contributions in empirical works, addressing the question of what is the effect of a price change on household well-being. This simple question is one of the most relevant and controversial questions in microeconomic theory and one of the main sources of errors in empirical economics. In particular, this book aims to 1) Review the essential microeconomics literature since the first seminal papers by Hicks in the 1930s; 2) Organize and simplify this literature in a way that can be easily used by analysts with different backgrounds providing algebraic, geometric and computational illustrations; 3) identify and measure the essential differences across methods and test how these differences affect empirical results; 4) Provide guidelines for the use of alternative approaches under imperfect information on utility, demand systems, elasticities and more generally incomes and quantities; 5) Provide computational codes in Statafor the application of all methods. The focus of the book is on developing economies and the poor, and the assumptions made will relate primarily to these countries and group of people, presumably the main policy focus of international organizations and national governments.

Post Keynesian analyses of monetary production have not given much attention to households as institutions, while a good deal of the literature in feminist economics discusses households in a strictly microeconomic context, with little consideration of monetary phenomena. This book, a unique study of the capitalist economy, utilizes a distinctive combination of Post Keynesian, institutional, and gender analysis to examine household economics in capitalist society in order to flesh out the gaps in each. The author poses questions that cut across rigidly determined areas of inquiry, such as gender and money, and micro- and macroeconomic analysis. She grounds the discussion of households and their social and financial relations within a monetary theory of production, and provides many methodological, theoretical, and policy formulation insights to establish a framework that illuminates current problems of household debt.