Unemployment or Basic Income? — Danish Debates

Apart from the never ending discussion on how to stimulate economic growth and employment, unemployment has been the reason for three other recurrent debates in Denmark over the past 20 or so years. The first takes up unemployment benefits and the motivation of the unemployed to find employment, the second addresses how to engage the unemployed if they cannot be employed in a ‘normal’ job and the third, most prevalent during the 1970s and 1990s, turns on the merits and disadvantages of whether or not a basic income system would be the most reasonable way of dealing with the unemployment issue. It is the purpose of this essay to review the discourses on these three central issues of unemployment and public provision. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.