Seoul’s Stepping Stone Income program is being promoted as a more effective alternative to Korea’s primary social safety net, the Basic Livelihood scheme, with new evidence suggesting that it helps low-income households move off public benefits while improving living standards, work incentives and community participation. At Tuesday’s international forum on the initiative, Mayor Oh Se-hoon and leading scholars said the three-year policy experiment offers a practical blueprint for overhauling social safety nets in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and increasingly precarious work. According to Lee Jung-min, an economics professor who led the research on the program’s effects at Seoul National University, the share of beneficiary households that exited from receiving benefits in the program's third year rose by 1.1 percentage points compared with its second year. Meanwhile, the proportion of households whose labor income increased climbed by 2.8 percentage points, while spending on basic goods and nutrition indicators also improved. Launched in 2022 and concluded in June, St