Micro-investment perspective and the potential of the universal basic income

In this article, we explore the prospects of Basic Income (BI) as a development policy tool. Our approach is to analyse the BI as a tool for promoting micro-investments and as a general development policy instrument, thus deliberately departing from the perception of cash transfers as targeted poverty reduction tools. As experiences in testing BI systems in developing country contexts are limited to local and regional experiments in Namibia and India (Haarmann et al., 2009; Haarmann & Haarmann, 2012; Davala et al., 2015), conclusive assessments about the impacts of the BI cannot be drawn. Therefore, we aim to estimate potential impacts of the BI by synthesising existing knowledge. This esti…