A First Approach to the Cost of a Basic Social Benefit

The Social Security System in Spain is significantly broader and more complex than in other EU countries. One of its problems is that it was not created as a single whole. Instead of this, there are different kinds of social assistance service depending on the region, so there is a real need to reduce the complexity of these schemes and homogenise the benefits paid out in a general basic social benefit. In this paper we propose a new approach to universal basic protection benefit (called Basic Social Benefit) as a way of unifying and rationalising the different grants and economic aids currently available in Spain in order to cover the basic needs of all citizens. This is the first study made in Spain in calculating the lump sum of a basic social benefit for the whole population. For this, we use Quantile Regression (QR) to calculate the principal variables that explain the minimum vital expenditures of Spanish citizens. We also show the total financial cost of this measure for Spain in 2010 and a projection of the cost for the next 12 years.