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| It didn't generate any jobs, but Finland's universal basic income experiment still yielded valuable insights |
A groundbreaking trial providing a guaranteed basic monthly income to 2,000 jobless people has led to improved wellbeing but failed to boost employment, Finnish authorities announced on Friday.
Last
December the Nordic nation concluded a two-year experiment in which a randomly
selected group of unemployed people were paid an unconditional, tax-free 560
euros ($634) a month.
Researchers
studied whether the no-strings-attached income could better incentivise jobless
people to find work than traditional unemployment benefits, which may be docked
as soon as the recipient starts earning money.
Although
the widest such study to be conducted in recent years in Europe, the Finnish
trial was limited to participants who were already unemployed.
Proponents
of a true "universal income" call for a monthly payent, sometimes
described as a citizens' wage, to be given to everyone regardless of their
wealth, family or work situation.
Nevertheless
Finnish researchers believe their findings provide important insights for
reforming the country's system of welfare payments.
"The
recipients of a basic income had less stress symptoms as well as less
difficulties to concentrate and less health problems than the control
group," Minna Ylikanno, lead researcher at Finland's welfare authority
Kela, said in a statement.
"They
were also more confident in their future and in their ability to influence
societal issues," she added.
Results at
this stage are preliminary and relate only to the first year of the study, meaning
Friday's findings are far from conclusive.
But a
hoped-for stiumulus to levels of employment has not yet materialised, the
project's researchers said.
"The
recipients of a basic income were no better or worse than the control group at
finding employment in the open labour market", Ohto Kanninen, research
coordinator at the Labour Institute for Economic Research, said in a statement.
Finland's
social affairs minister, Pirkko Mattila, conceded on Friday that the government
has no plans to roll out the scheme across the whole country.
"Even
though the basic income model developed for the experiment is not likely to be
adopted as such for more extensive use, I think the experiment was very
successful," Mattila said in a statement.
"We
can use the data from the experiment to redesign our social security system;
that is going to be the next major reform.”
Similar
schemes have been trialled in Canada and Kenya.
The
experiment has not been without its detractors. Finnish trade unions have
called instead for employers to pay living wages that do not need to be
subsidised by benefits.
The
Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has
claimed that a basic income programme in Finland would not be economically
viable and could leave significant numbers of people in worse poverty than now.
In 2017,
Swiss voters rejected a proposed universal income in a referendum after critics
slammed the idea as rewarding the lazy and the feckless.
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