An Experiment Where Unemployed Finns Were Given A Basic Income Failed To Encourage Them To Find Work, Researchers Have Found.
“The basic income experiment did not increase the employment of participants during the first trial year,” Kela, the Finnish government agency in charge of benefits, said in a statement on the project’s preliminary findings on Friday.
Kela, in conjunction with the Finnish Centre for Economic Research and other partners including the universities of Turku and Helsinki, began a two-year experiment in January 2017 where 2,000 randomly-selected unemployed people were given a monthly basic income of €560 (£490/$634) regardless of any other income they may have or if they were actively seeking employment.
Researchers found that while the free money had neither negative nor positive impact on the participants gaining employment, “those who received the basic income felt better at the end of the experiment than those in the control group.”- READ MORE