Ms. Palermo Kuss, who received her PhD in economics from the Götz Werner Chair (GWP), is the only economist among the finalists for the German Thesis Award of the Körber Foundation. Her contribution is entitled: “Unconditional Basic Income: A concept for the welfare state of the 21st century? Economic investigation of possible effects and popularity”. Ms. Palermo Kuss is now working at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW).

We asked her what the nomination means to her personally and how it might affect the debate around Basic Income: “I am very happy about the nomination of my doctoral thesis for the German Thesis Award. The nomination shows that the topic of Basic Income is of great importance to society. The compatibility of a basic income with existing social security systems is a topic that needs further research. So, I am delighted that FRIBIS dedicates itself to this task. Whether basic income is a concept for the welfare state of the 21st century depends directly on whether the concrete policy reform contributes positively to people’s freedom and self-determination as well as to societal prosperity.”

The entire FRIBIS-Team congratulates Ms. Palermo Kuss on this outstanding achievement and wishes her all the best for her personal and professional future.

Further information about Ms. Palermo Kuss can be found on the ZEW homepage, more details on the study award of the Körber Foundation can be found here.

Catarina Neves and Roberto Merrill (Portugal) will be in Freiburg as FRIBIS visiting scholars between 18 and 23 November 2021. They will offer a symposium on basic income experiments on 22 November.

22 November 2021, 6:00-8:00 p.m.:
Basic Income Experiments: A Critical Examination of Their Goals, Contexts, and Methods.
Location: HS 1009, Kollegiengebäude I, Platz der Universität 3, 79098, Freiburg.
Important Update: Due to the recent Covid regulations of the state of Baden-Württemberg, only fully vaccinated or recovered persons are allowed (2G) to participate in the symposium of Roberto Merrill and Catarina Neves. Therefore, unvaccinated or non-recovered persons can no longer attend the event, even with a negative PCR test.

The symposium will be recorded and uploaded on the FRIBIS YouTube channel.

“The focus of the symposium will be their newly published book. The book brings together insights and reflections following a set of interviews conducted with the main stakeholders involved in past, current, and future basic income experiments. It provides an analysis of some of the major elements and factors influencing experiments, as well of some of their most important outputs understood as results of their own experimental design, their sociological and political basis, and the epistemological status of their results.

By pursuing a bottom-up strategy, where the interviews conducted take a pivotal role in the collection and analysis phase of the book, this book gathers key questions relating to policy experiments. Some questions reflected upon include the general idea of why one should engage and implement a basic income experiment, and the paradox consisting in the fact that most basic income experiments fall short of being closely considered ‘pure’ basic income schemes. In facing the question and the paradox head-on, the book assesses questions of experimental design, the political and social context surrounding the policy, and the main results and what can they tell us about basic income.”

Roberto Merrill is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Minho, where he coordinates the Master of Political Philosophy. He is also a researcher at the Center for Ethics, Politics and Society (CEPS), where he directs the Research Project on Unconditional Basic Income. He has published and edited several books, the most recent one in 2019 on the UBI (Rendimento Básico Incondicional: uma defesa da liberdade).

Catarina Neves is a PhD student at the University of Minho. She focuses on the philosophical justification of the Unconditional Basic Income, namely on the objection of reciprocity. She aims to find out to what extent theoretical concepts can be found in empirical experiments on the UBI. She is also a teaching assistant at the Nova School of Business and Economics (Lisbon, Portugal) where she gives courses on corporate social responsibility and global business challenges.

Watch the recordings of the contributions of the first annual FRIBIS conference, 2021 on our Youtube channel.

This year’s the FRIBIS conference shed light on an emerging topic in economics of UBI: the monetary issues of a UBI. Monetary aspects are becoming more important due to an increasing economic interest in monetary innovations and major disruptions in central banking and finance.

UBI research is being increasingly influenced by this development. UBI pilots use specifically minted currencies to ensure local spending, and new strands of transformative economics propose monetary financing or community currencies as financing mechanisms for a UBI.

FRIBIS acknowledges this evolution by creating research teams in order to keep up-to-date with research in this field. At this year’s conference, FRIBIS presented this teams’ research, as well as other research activities. In addition, research collaborations were presented.

The event language is English.

Here you can find the event program

The research group arround Dr. Wolfgang Gründinger published the paper “Carbon Pricing and Social Equity in Germany” in the journal “Momentum Quarterly”. Prof. Neumärker participated in this research group among others.

The paper is written in German.

Link to the paper

Bernhard Neumärker, Bianca Blum, Burhan Yalcin and Sema Yalcin have jointly published a new paper in the FRIBIS Discussion Paper Series, which is available in both German and English. Its topic is the counterfinancing of the Net Basic Income in times of debt-financed relief ​during the Corona Crisis.

In addition, Bianca Blum and Bernhard Neumärker have also published another paper in the journal World 2021, 2(2), entitled Lessons from Globalization and the COVID-19 Pandemic for Economic, Environmental and Social Policy. The paper analyzes the current economic and social crises, which have only been exacerbated by the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. The authors discuss not only the extent to which Basic Income offers a non-bureaucratic solution to the social and financial hardships of the current crisis, but also the role it could play in addressing the social and environmental challenges of the post-crisis period.

On October 7, at 6:00 p.m., FRIBIS will host a Zoom event on Net Basic Income. Bianca Blum and Bernhard Neumärker, along with Susanne Wiest, the parliamentary petitioner for the crisis basic income, as well as Enno Schmidt (Freiburg Götz Werner Chair) will take a stand on their publications and report on their experiences with the parliamentary petition.

If you would like to participate in the event, please subscribe to our newsletter here. In doing so, you will receive the event link in good time and always stay up to date on the latest developments at FRIBIS.