What A Global Basic Services Guarantee — Water, Food, Shelter, Health, Education — Would Require

The debate between Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Universal Basic Services (UBS) is ongoing, and both have merits. But UBS has several structural advantages for a global basic guarantee:

1. Services are more efficient than cash in contexts of market failure. In many low-income settings, the market for healthcare, education, or clean water doesn't function well. Providers are scarce. Information asymmetries are severe. Monopolies exist. Simply giving people cash in these contexts doesn't reliably produce access to services, because the services may not exist or may be unaffordable even with additional income.

2. Services build infrastructure. A UBS program that builds schools, trains teachers, constructs water systems, and staffs clinics creates lasting infrastructure. A UBI payment may improve this year's consumption without creating durable capacity.

3. Services create collective benefit. Education and health systems serve entire communities, not just individuals. A school built for 200 children benefits all 200. Cash transfers benefit one person at a time.

4. Services resist inflation. In contexts where cash transfers increase demand for scarce goods, prices rise, partially or entirely offsetting the transfer. Services bypass this mechanism by providing the good directly.

The UBS model, as developed by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, proposes that certain services are so fundamental to human participation in society that they should be provided as public goods -- like roads, policing, and fire protection -- rather than as market commodities.

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1. Water and Sanitation

Current state: 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water. 3.5 billion lack safely managed sanitation. 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with feces.

What's needed: - Protected wells, piped water systems, and water treatment facilities for all unserved and underserved communities. - Sanitation infrastructure: toilets, sewage systems, or safely managed on-site sanitation. - Water quality monitoring and maintenance systems. - Watershed protection and groundwater management.

Cost estimate: $28.4 billion per year above current spending, sustained over 10-15 years (WHO/World Bank).

Technical difficulty: Low. Water and sanitation engineering is mature technology. The challenges are political (governance of water resources), financial (directing investment to underserved areas), and logistical (reaching remote communities).

2. Food Security

Current state: 735 million people face hunger. 2.4 billion people experience moderate or severe food insecurity. Hunger has increased since 2015, reversing decades of progress.

What's needed: - Investment in smallholder agriculture (which produces roughly 35% of global food on less than 25% of farmland). - School feeding programs (currently reaching about 418 million children in 161 countries -- expansion needed). - Social protection systems (food assistance, conditional transfers) during shocks. - Reduction of food waste (roughly one-third of food produced globally is lost or wasted). - Climate-resilient agricultural systems.

Cost estimate: $23-40 billion per year (various UN and academic estimates). The Ceres2030 project, a rigorous costing exercise published in Nature, estimated $33 billion per year to end hunger by 2030.

3. Shelter

Current state: 1.8 billion people lack adequate housing. 150 million are homeless. Over 1 billion live in informal settlements.

What's needed: - Housing construction and upgrading in areas of acute shortage. - Secure land tenure (many informal settlement residents could improve their own housing if they had legal security of tenure). - Building materials and technical assistance for self-build housing. - Housing finance accessible to low-income populations. - Protection against eviction and displacement.

Cost estimate: $11-20 billion per year for the most critical interventions (UN-Habitat), though full global adequacy would require significantly more.

4. Healthcare

Current state: At least half the world's population cannot access essential health services. 100 million people are pushed into extreme poverty by healthcare costs each year.

What's needed: - Primary healthcare facilities staffed and supplied in all communities. - Essential medicines available and affordable (the WHO Essential Medicines List identifies roughly 500 products that should be universally available). - Reproductive health services, maternal care, and childhood immunization. - Pandemic preparedness and response capacity. - Mental health services integrated into primary care.

Cost estimate: $58-71 billion per year for low and lower-middle-income countries (WHO). This would fund a package of essential services covering the major causes of preventable death and disability.

5. Education

Current state: 250 million children are out of school. 617 million children and adolescents cannot read a basic sentence or do basic math, even if they attend school.

What's needed: - Enough schools for all children, including in conflict-affected and remote areas. - Trained, adequately paid teachers (the global teacher shortage is estimated at 44 million by 2030). - Learning materials, including digital infrastructure where appropriate. - Early childhood education (the highest-return educational investment). - Secondary education and vocational training accessible to all.

Cost estimate: $39 billion per year for low and lower-middle-income countries (UNESCO).

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Total estimated cost: $160-200 billion per year.

Finding this money does not require inventing new revenue sources. It requires redirecting existing ones.

Option 1: Military reallocation. A 10% reduction in global military spending would free approximately $220 billion per year. More than enough.

Option 2: Fossil fuel subsidy reform. The IMF estimates that fossil fuels receive $7 trillion per year in explicit and implicit subsidies. Redirecting 3% of that would fund the entire basic services guarantee.

Option 3: Tax haven closure. The $427 billion lost annually to tax havens would fund the guarantee twice over.

Option 4: Financial transaction tax. A tiny tax (0.01-0.05%) on financial transactions could generate $200-400 billion annually, according to various estimates.

Option 5: Combination. In practice, funding would come from multiple sources. The point is that the resources exist. This is a political problem, not an economic one.

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The economic returns to basic services provision are documented beyond reasonable dispute:

- Every $1 invested in water and sanitation returns $4-12 in economic benefits (WHO). - Every $1 invested in early childhood nutrition returns $16-45 in economic productivity (Copenhagen Consensus). - Every additional year of schooling increases individual earnings by approximately 10% (Psacharopoulos & Patrinos, World Bank). - Universal healthcare coverage reduces catastrophic health expenditure, increases labor force participation, and reduces poverty traps. - Adequate housing reduces healthcare costs, improves educational outcomes for children, and increases employment stability.

The basic services guarantee is not an expense. It is the highest-return investment available to the human species.

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1. Personal Baseline: Which of the five basic services do you have reliable access to? If any are unreliable, how does that affect the rest of your life?

2. Cost Contextualization: Pick one of the funding options above (military reallocation, subsidy reform, tax haven closure, financial transaction tax). Research the political obstacles. Who benefits from the current allocation? Who would resist change? Why?

3. Local Mapping: In your community, which of the five services has the largest gap? Who falls through? What would it take to close the gap locally?

4. The Sufficiency Question: If you had guaranteed access to water, food, shelter, health, and education -- but nothing else guaranteed -- would that be enough? What would you build from that foundation?

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- Coote, A. & Percy, A. (2020). The Case for Universal Basic Services. Polity Press. - Ceres2030. (2020). "Ending Hunger, Increasing Incomes, and Protecting the Climate." Nature Food, 1, 616-620. - WHO. (2019). "SDG Costing and Financing for Low and Middle-Income Countries." WHO/UHC Monitoring Report. - UNESCO. (2023). Global Education Monitoring Report. - UN-Habitat. (2022). World Cities Report: Envisaging the Future of Cities.