Universal Basic Income in the Developing World

Abhijit Banerjee, Paul Niehaus, Tavneet Suri

NBER Working Paper No. 25598
Issued in February 2019
NBER Program(s):Development Economics Program

Should developing countries give everyone enough money to live on? Interest in this idea has grown enormously in recent years, reflecting both positive results from a number of existing cash transfer programs and also dissatisfaction with the perceived limitations of piecemeal, targeted approaches to reducing extreme poverty. We discuss what we know (and what we do not) about three questions: what recipients would likely do with the incremental income, whether this would unlock further economic growth, and the potential consequences of giving the money to everyone (as opposed to targeting it).

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w25598

Published: Abhijit Banerjee & Paul Niehaus & Tavneet Suri, 2019. "Universal Basic Income in the Developing World," Annual Review of Economics, vol 11(1).