What will people do if they are given money without conditions? Will they work more? Would they take days off? Will they become lazy?
These were some of the questions that the project developed by the government of Finland was trying to answer.
What is this project about?
Well, it's actually quite simple, the original project consists of selecting from a group of 175,000 unemployed people, in an age range of 25 to 58 years, to deliver to 2000 of them, during a period of 24 months, an income basic equivalent to 560 euros tax-free monthly.
During the experiment, those selected would still receive universal basic income even if they decided to find work, that is, the income was unconditional.
Because some of the elected ones received more than 560 euros in Social Security grants, they were also paid the difference between the amount received and the 560 euros. However, people who during the two years of the experiment have found work, or exceeded the maximum amount of public aid established, saw their benefits reduced, but continue to receive basic income until the project ends.
Although the plan was to extend the scope of the project to larger groups of the population, the Government of Finland announced that it has preferred to end the program.
Well, in a previous publication I addressed the issue of the Universal Basic Income and the possible causes of its failure, you can find this publication by clicking here, however, it would be unfair for me to qualify the suspension of this project as a failure of the Basic Income Universal, since according to the classic definition, Universal Basic Income is an unconditional periodic payment received by all citizens, without income or employment requirements; and this program designed by the government of Finland, is simply a Basic Income program, because it lacks universality, which makes it a common subsidy like the many others we already know.
I have heard statements from different people who say that the project failed because it was not implemented universally, however, I believe that this project did not have an even more resounding failure due to the same reason.
We can not say that the Finnish project does not go beyond being an unemployment subsidy, because despite the fact that the population selected to receive this income were exclusively people who at the time of starting the project were unemployed, if the participants got employment once the project started, they would continue to receive the income, which is not the case with unemployment subsidies.
Other important factors were the fact that the subsidy was only given to 2000 people out of a total population of more than 5 million inhabitants, in addition to the fact that the majority of those selected already received some kind of unemployment benefit, among others types of social assistance, so because the project was used in a very small population, and because the Basic Income represented only a small increase in correlation to the social assistance that they already received, there was no considerable increase in the money supply in circulation, so there was no impact on inflation.
However, the government of Finland decided that the model implemented in the project did not meet the requirements because it did not yield the expected results. Now we just have to wait for the results of the other projects that are being carried out in Canada, Holland, Scotland, Kenya and India.
