A Critical Approach to Basic Income: Costs and Incentives. An Approximation to the Case of Spa

This paper estimates the costs of basic income and analyses its incentives to conclude that there is an inverse relationship between them. The more unconditional the basic income is, the less incentive problems will arise, but it will be more costly. We approximate its costs to the case of Spain, both using a macroeconomic approach and one with micro data. The high cost of the universal basic income implementation requires to limit the number of recipients by income or labour status and, therefore, labour supply and human capital incentive problems could be materialized. Implications for inequality are also discussed.