2018, Vol.25, No.1

Korea Social Policy Review 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 2.47

pISSN : 1226-0525
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kasp

The digital revolution has brought about both positive expectations and negative concerns. Many experts predict that the current technological revolution, so-called "Fourth Industrial Revolution", which is expected to increase productivity in a disruptive way, has significant implications on employment and the labor market. In subsequence, the possible demise of the traditional employment system could markedly undermine the comtemporary welfare state. As a result, basic income has emerged as an alternative. However, little welfare state research has conducted the systematic review on the impact of the present technological revolution on employment and welfare states. In this paper, we will start to review the gist of the digital revolution and critically review recent studies on its effects on employment and welfare states together with actual case studies. In particular, we will investigate the experiences of platform economies of Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk, and the German experience from 'Work 4.0'. Finally, we will discuss key issues of future welfare state reforms. This research argues that the effects of the technological revolution on employment and welfare state policies would be enormous, but they will be most likely to be mediated by domestic political and policy institutions. It emphasizes the importance of high-quality social investment that would enable individuals to flexibly adapt technological changes and support creative human capital resource. But, high-quality social investment could not be sustained without the decent social protection system that universally provides security to people.

After critically assessing the effectiveness of basic income as an alternative to the existing social security system, this article argues that basic income is fundamentally incapable of providing an adequate protection for those in social risks or welfare needs. The proponents of basic income often claims that technological innovations will lead to the end of work and thus that basic income will be required for all citizens in the future. Moreover, they emphasize that labor market flexibility is making a large segment of work forces unstable working poor, what is often called the precariat who are not effectively protected by the existing social insurance programs. For them, basic income is the best source of social protection for the precariat of today and the citizens in the future, freeing them from the necessity of having a paid work. This article, however, points out the ineffectiveness of basic income as social protection due to its unustainably high cost that comes from unconditional benefit provisions regardless of levels of income, social risks, and welfare needs. Also it challenges the simplified ‘Luddites’ image of workless society in the future, arguning that techological unemployment can be overcome by new job creation as seen in Silicon Valley and job sharing following working time reduction. It maintains that it is more cost-effective and reliable to strengthen the welfare state based on the principle of reciprocity that aims at ‘universal sufficient protection for those in social risks and welfare needs.’

Globalization, deindustrialization, and the revolutionary development of technology has led to the concerns that existing social policies might not be fit for the current and upcoming society. At the same time, the idea of universal basic income has drawn significant attentions as the alternative to the old welfare state. There are pros and cons of basic income, and scholars of both sides stand against each other with their equivalently strong logics. In this situation, some governments have planned or conducted field experiments in order to estimate the causal effects of basic income. This study explores the Finnish and Dutch basic income experiments in methodological perspective. All the World have been watching the experiments in these two countries with keen interest. The results of these experiments will surely influence on the pros and cons of basic income in numerous countries, including South Korea. It is important to precisely figure out the methodological meanings and limitations of the experiments, for the experiments in both countries deal with only some partial components of basic income and have been exposed to many threats to internal validity. Therefore, scholars for and against basic income should be careful in interpreting the findings from these experiments. This study elucidate the methodological meanings and limitations of the Finnish and Dutch basic income experiments. Furthermore, this study extracts some lessons from these experiments that would be useful if scholars would have an opportunity to design and conduct a basic income experiment in South Korea.