At its launch last year, Finland’s universal basic income experiment was hailed as a progressive and bold move towards a system that many – including billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – think holds the key to eradicating inequality.
But these dreams hit a bump in the road earlier this week when it emerged that the Finnish government had rejected a proposal to extend its experiment. Although many reports claimed this meant the end of basic income in Finland, this actually means that the experiment will only run until the end of 2018, as initially planned.
“It seems that there is some misinformation spreading in international media about the Finnish basic income experiment,” says Miska Simanainen, a researcher at Kela, the Finnish government agency behind the trial. “There are currently no plans to continue or expand the experiment after 2018, but this is not new information,” he adds.
Instead, the Finnish government will wait for the results from this initial trial before making any decisions about a wider roll-out of the initiative. The results from the trial will be available by the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020, Simanainen explains.
Finland is only experimenting with a very narrow version of basic income that focuses on understanding whether giving monthly payments to people out of work changes their employment prospects. Since January 2017, a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people have been given a monthly (€560) £475 with no obligation to seek or accept employment for the duration of the trial.
According to the BBC, Kela had asked the government for an extra €40 to 70 million (£35 to £61m) to also fund basic income for a group of employed people. This would be much closer to a ‘true’ universal basic income trial since one of the central tenants of the theory is that a set amount is given to everyone, no matter how much they earn.
But the aim of the austerity-focussed centre-right Finnish government is to reduce the country’s 8.5 per cent unemployment rate, and the basic income trial is just one way of attempting to do that. “Reforming the social security system is strongly on the political agenda,” says Simanainen. “However, politicians are also discussing many other models of social security than just basic income.”
With national elections scheduled for next spring, Simanainen says that it’s too early to entirely write-off basic income experiments in the country. “We expect to see a lot of discussion on social security reforms and further experiments then,” he explains.
In the meantime, a handful of other countries are forging ahead with their own basic income trials. In Ontario, Canada, two cities and a town having been trialling basic income since June 2017. The participants, who can have any employment status, are split into two groups. One receives basic income payments of up to $17,000 Canadian dollars (£9,500) while the others don’t get anything at all. People in work will have their payments reduced by up to 50 per cent, and it is only available to those on a low income, which makes this trial a slightly watered-down version of universal basic income – although it is still way beyond the scope of the Finnish experiment.
Currently, around 2,000 people are taking part in the trial, although this figure is expected to rise to around 4,000 as it continues. People in the group receiving the monthly basic income payments could be part of the experiment for as long as three years.
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Barcelona is also in the middle of its own basic income experiment, launched in October 2017. Called B-MINCOME, the trial involves 2,000 participants, half of them in a control group that doesn’t receive any money. The other half is receiving between €400 and €525 (£350 – £460) over the next two years. The money does come with a few conditions, however. It is given to households, not individuals, and some participants only receive the money if they attend support programmes related to employment, housing and community action.
Scotland is also taking the first tentative steps towards a basic income trial. Last November, first minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that the Scottish government would provide a £250,000 trial to support the first basic income trials in the UK. The four authorities involved in the two-year pilot include Glasgow and Edinburgh, but it’s still not clear when the trial will kick off, or how exactly it will work.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
