Session supported by the Academy of Finland Strategic Research Council -funded project “Tackling Inequalities in Time of Austerity (TITA)
Parallel Session A.3 – 10:45 – 12:00, Thursday 2 May, Sala del Consiglio, Villa Salviati, EUI
Basic Income has become an increasingly popular topic in debates on the future of social welfare policies. It has been proposed as a means of securing economic wellbeing and security in times of economic change, and criticised for being too expensive and for disincentivising work. This session debates the advantages and disadvantages of Basic Income and offers reflections on the experiences and first results from the Finnish Basic Income experiment, which provided a monthly unconditional cash transfer of € 560 over two years to 2,000 unemployed individuals, whereas an identical control group remained under the existing benefit scheme. What were the main employment and welfare impacts? Did the Finnish and other similar experiments make us any wiser? Is Basic Income the future of social policy, or an expensive fad?
Moderator: Ellen Immergut, Professor of Political Sciences, EUI
Speakers:
Olli Kangas, Principal Investigator, Finnish Universal Basic Income Experiment, and Professor of Practice, University of Turku
Hilmar Schneider, Professor and CEO, Institute of Labour Economics (IZA), Bonn
Pasquale Tridico, President, Italian National Institute of Social Security (INPS)
Philippe Van Parijs, Professor of Philosophy, Université Catholique de Louvain, and Robert Schuman Fellow, RSCAS, EUI
Universal Basic Income Data
The State of the Union partnered with YouGov to discover what Europeans think about Basic income, please select below the country to see the results.
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