Details of the unconditional local currency income experiment in Maricá can be found here; with a translation in Portuguese here.
The European Commission is advertising for a post-doctoral researcher to study the unconditional local currency experiment in Maricá in Brazil. Details of the opportunity can be found here.
Marie Claire has published an article by Katia Savchuk that describes the experience of one of the participants in an experiment that gave $1,000 a month for a year to twenty individuals selected by ballot.
… In November 2018, McDonald got a call from Aisha Nyandoro, head of Springboard to Opportunities, a local nonprofit where McDonald had taken a career-readiness class. Nyandoro said she’d picked McDonald’s name in a lottery to get $1,000 a month for a year, as part of an experiment called Magnolia Mother’s Trust that was giving no-strings-attached cash to 20 Black single mothers in Jackson’s low-income housing. When her first check arrived, McDonald had $1.01 in her bank account. …
Click here to read the article.
The New Yorker has reported on the results of the experiment in Stockton, where five hundred individuals randomly selected from the city’s most deprived districts have been receiving US$100 per month unconditionally.
… For example, during the pandemic, the percentage of money that participants spent on food, consistently the largest category, reached nearly twenty-five per cent over the monthly average, while the amount spent on recreation dropped to less than two per cent.
Participants have also put the money toward rent, car payments, and paying off debt, as well as one-off expenses for themselves or their children: dental surgery, a prom dress, football camp, and shoes. They’ve also been able to cut back on working second and third jobs; one participant, a forty-eight-year-old mother of two who works full time at Tesla, was able to stop working as a delivery driver for DoorDash. Alcohol and tobacco has accounted for less than one per cent of spending per month. …
(To read previous articles on the experiment, click here)
At a presentation on Wednesday 6th May, Kela, the Finnish social security agency, gave further results from the first year of its Basic Income experiment.
The trial group was 2,000 randomly selected unemployed individuals who had their unemployment benefit made unconditional for a period of two years. A control group of 173,000 unemployed individuals had no changes made to their unemployment benefit.
During the first year of the trial there was no statistically significant change in employment market activity among the trial sample. Analysis of the data generated by the second year of the experiment has now shown that, for the trial group, employment rose on average by six days between November 2017 and October 2018. Larger increases were experienced by families with children, and by individuals whose mother tongue was not Finnish. Evaluation of the second year’s employment data had been complicated by the implementation of a more activation-oriented social security system for unemployed individuals half way through the experiment, which means that changes in employment market behaviour will have been affected by various consequences of the new policy as well as by the unconditionality of the trial group’s unemployment benefit.
The response rate to survey questions about wellbeing was predictably low, but it had still been possible to conclude that, compared with 5,000 randomly selected individuals from the control group, the trial group had experienced a higher rate of generalised trust, less stress, less depression, less bureaucracy, less financial stress, and better cognitive functioning.
From interviews with 81 recipients of the Basic Income, it was discovered that some had experienced a wider variety of participation in society outside employment, and that a sense of autonomy had increased.
The researchers had concluded that wellbeing effects were more significant than employment market effects, which mirrored results from experiments with different but similar mechanisms in Canada and the Netherlands.
A telephone survey to gauge public opinion after the experiment had found that 46% of respondents believed that a Basic Income should be introduced.
The discussion that followed the presentation explored the definition of Basic Income, whether different experiments could be compared if they were experimenting with different things, the importance of a secure layer of income, how long it would take to implement a Basic Income, the importance of social experiments, whether a Basic Income would make people lazy, and the extent to which the effects of a nationwide and permanent implementation of a Basic Income scheme would differ from those of a two year experiment.
Still to do: a report in English; a report on experiment participants’ use of other social benefits and services; and a study of the reasons for individuals with a non-Finnish mother tongue had been disproportionately enabled by their Basic Incomes to gain new skills and find employment.
To see a recording of the presentation, click here.
The final report can be found here. An English summary will be found on the last few pages, starting on page 187.
Social Europe has published an article about the results by Philippe Van Parijs
.
Finland’s Basic Income Experiment was the world’s first statutory, nationwide and randomized basic income experiment. That experiment, in which preliminary results have already been reported on, several research questions were asked: How did the Basic Income Experiment affect participants’ employment? What were the effects on health, livelihoods and experiences of government bureaucracy? In interviews, how do the participants perceive the significance of the experiment in their lives?
The final results of the basic income experiment will be released on Wednesday, May 6th 2020, online. In this webcast, researchers present findings of the basic income experiment on employment and well-being of the participants.
The results presented are based on an analysis register data from both pilot years as well as on face-to-face interviews with the participants in the experiment. In addition, survey data has been analyzed more comprehensively than before.
The webcast will be held, in Finnish, from 1 pm to 2:15 pm and, in English, from 2:20 pm to 3:00 pm (Finnish time, GMT+3). The webcast is open to anyone interested.
