Which countries have experimented with basic income — and what were the results?
Updated Oct 20, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC
Grace receives $22 a month as part of a 12-year universal basic income study run by the charity GiveDirectly that began in October 2016 in Western Kenya. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
Grace receives $22 a month as part of a 12-year universal basic income study run by the charity GiveDirectly that began in October 2016 in Western Kenya. | Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
Sigal Samuel is a senior reporter for Vox’s Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic.
The idea of a basic income was, for decades, something of a policy fantasy. But the last few years have seen it become less outlandish, to the point where we now have many limited basic income programs up and running around the world — perhaps a dry run for a broader embrace of the policy in the coming years.
The general idea — that the government should give every citizen a regular infusion of free money with no strings attached — has been around since the 16th century. But it’s recently experienced a remarkable resurgence: Advocates ranging from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg to libertarian economist Milton Friedman to former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang have endorsed it.
The Covid-19 pandemic has given the idea fresh momentum. With the crisis generating so much financial loss and uncertainty, and with federal stimulus packages failing to meet the needs of millions, advocates are arguing that citizens desperately need some sort of guaranteed income.
And around the world, countries are running pilot programs to test it.
Andrew Yang campaigning in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 8, 2020. Yang touted a universal basic income during his presidential campaign. Scott Olson/Getty Images
With a few exceptions — Kenya, where a big experiment in universal basic income (UBI) is underway; Iran, which has a nationwide unconditional cash transfer program; and Alaska, which gives an annual dividend to everyone in the state — basic income programs are offering money to small groups of a few hundred or a few thousand people, not an entire polity. In other words, they offer a basic income, but not a universal basic income.
These small-scale trials are necessary because governments want to have a good sense of what the effects will be before they start shelling out many billions or trillions of dollars. Proponents of basic income argue it’s the best way to end poverty: Just give everyone money! Some also say it’ll help society cope with a coming era of automation-induced joblessness. And the evidence so far suggests that getting a basic income tends to boost happiness, health, school attendance, and trust in social institutions, while reducing crime.
But critics worry that it will disincentivize work, cheating economies out of productivity and cheating individuals out of the sense of meaning that work can bring. Plus, they say, it’s just plain unaffordable for the government to pay every citizen enough to live on regardless of whether they work. The evidence so far does not support these critiques, as you’ll see.
Below are all the places that are trying or have tried some version of basic income. You’ll find that only unconditional cash transfers are included here. Some 130 countries, from Mexico to Italy to Uganda, have instituted conditional cash transfers, which may require recipients to send their kids to school or go for health checkups. Although these programs have proven beneficial in some cases, they’re not the subject of this piece.
Note that most of the basic income projects here are funded by governments, but a few are funded by private donors. Scroll down for details on how each place gave out or is giving out free money — and what behavioral effects it seems to have on the recipients.
The US has tried a few basic income experiments, but most have been short-lived small-scale trials.
Alaska is an exception. Since 1982, the state has given each citizen an annual check just for being alive, effectively wiping out extreme poverty. The money — which can range from around $2,000 per person when oil prices are high to $1,000 in cheaper gas years — comes from the Alaska Permanent Fund, a state-owned investment fund financed by oil revenues.
Economists investigated whether the payment was leading people to work less and found that “the dividend had no effect on employment” overall. (It has, apparently, had an effect on fertility, encouraging families to have more kids. It’s also had some unexpected effects on the state’s politics.)
Katherine Hayes demonstrates urging Alaska lawmakers to fund a full oil wealth fund check, known locally as the PFD or Permanent Fund Dividend, on July 8, 2019, in Wasilla, Alaska. Mark Thiessen/AP
Another long-running program is the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Casino Dividend in North Carolina. Since 1997, revenue from a casino on tribal land has been given to every tribal member, no strings attached. Each person gets on average somewhere between $4,000 and $6,000 per year. Economists found that it doesn’t make them work less. It does lead to improved education and mental health, and decreased addiction and crime.
Between 1968 and 1974, the US experimented with giving cash to around 7,500 people in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Seattle, Denver, and Gary, Indiana. The money proved beneficial to recipients but did modestly reduce the hours they worked; Dylan Matthews has explained for Vox why we shouldn’t make too much of that slight reduction.
In 2019, Andrew Yang tried out a sensationalistic yet effective method of promoting basic income: giving it out himself. First, he promised to give $1,000 per month, for 12 months, to someone who retweets and follows him on Twitter. Then, on the presidential debate stage, he announced that he’d give away $1,000 per month to 10 randomly selected families. We don’t know exactly what effects the cash may have had on the recipients, because the giveaways weren’t formal research studies, but they’re worth mentioning because they drew a lot of attention to the concept of a basic income.
What about current projects? Stockton, California, is in the midst of an 18-month experiment: It’s giving $500 per month to 125 people. The money comes from individual and foundation philanthropy, with the initial $1 million in funding coming from the Economic Security Project. The first batch of data shows the recipients are mostly spending the money on food, clothes, and utility bills. Y Combinator, which previously ran a small trial in Oakland, California, is now planning to start a new trial elsewhere in the US.
Between 1974 and 1979, Canada ran a randomized controlled trial in the province of Manitoba, choosing one farming town, Dauphin, as a “saturation site” where every family was eligible to participate in a basic income experiment. The basic income seemed to benefit residents’ physical and mental health — there was a decline in doctor visits and an 8.5 percent reduction in the rate of hospitalization — and high school graduation rates improved, too. Nevertheless, the project, known as “Mincome” and funded jointly by the provincial and federal governments, was canceled after four years when a more conservative party came into power.
Four decades later, another Canadian province, Ontario, was willing to try again. In 2017, the Liberal government launched a basic income pilot project in three cities: Hamilton, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay. It was supposed to help 4,000 low-income people and last for three years.
Jodi Dean with her daughter Madison in Hamilton, Ontario, on November 21, 2017. Dean, a Canadian mother of three, received her first basic income check one month prior. She said the extra money gave her family “the breathing room to not have to stress to put food on the table.” Rob Gillies/AP
But then a new Progressive Conservative government came into power, led by Ontario Premier Doug Ford. In 2018, they canceled the project after hearing from staff that it disincentivized participants from finding work. However, the pilot had only been active a short time, not long enough to gather the data required to support that claim. A handful of participants have since filed a class action lawsuit against the government.
Brazil has been experimenting with cash transfers to poor families since the 1990s, and it now runs the massive Bolsa Familia program, which gives millions of people cash transfers. This isn’t a UBI since the transfers are conditional — recipients are expected to keep their children in school and visit health clinics. But the massive program has formed the backdrop for Brazilian experiments in unconditional cash transfers.
From 2008 to 2014, a Brazilian nonprofit called the ReCivitas Institute administered a basic income — funded by private donors — in the village of Quatinga Velho. One hundred residents received 30 reais (about $8) per month.
This year, around 52,000 people in the Brazilian city of Maricá are receiving a basic income under a new program called the Renda Basica de Cidadania (Citizens’ Basic Income). Each will receive 130 reais per month (around $35), which is expected to lift many above the poverty line. Because the money is coming out of the city budget, mostly from oil royalties, this program has the potential to stick around for a long time; it currently has no end date.
In 2017, the Finnish government decided to see what would happen if it chose 2,000 unemployed citizens at random and gave them a check of 560 euros ($635) every month for two years. Participants were assured they’d keep receiving the money if they got a job. As it turned out, the income didn’t help them get jobs, but it did make them feel happier and less stressed. The recipients also reported that they felt more trust toward other people and social institutions — from political parties to the police to the courts — than they did before getting a basic income. Finland ended the trial in 2018.
In 2014, the nonprofit Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income) used crowdfunding to set up a basic income raffle. By the end of 2019, it had awarded almost 500 basic incomes to people all over the world who’d submitted their names. Each got about $1,100 per month for a year. According to Fast Company, 80 percent of recipients said the income made them less anxious, more than half said it enabled them to continue their education, and 35 percent said they now feel more motivated at work.
In 2019, the nonprofit Sanktionsfrei kicked off another basic income project funded entirely by private donors. For three years, 250 randomly chosen people in Germany will receive unconditional transfers of up to $466 per month, while 250 others act as a control group.
Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, Germany started a new basic income experiment in August: 120 Germans are receiving 1,200 euros ($1,430) every month for three years. They’ll fill out questionnaires about how the cash benefit is affecting their emotional well-being, home life, and work life. Their responses will then be compared with the responses of a control group of 1,380 people who are not receiving a basic income. The German Institute for Economic Research is conducting the study, and it’s funded by 140,000 private donations collected by Mein Grundeinkommen.
In 2017, Spain’s “B-MINCOME” experiment started offering a minimum guaranteed income to 1,000 households randomly selected from some of Barcelona’s poorest districts. Under the two-year randomized controlled trial, households could receive up to 1,675 euros ($1,968) per month. There was also a control group of 383 households.
The experiment split up the households into four “modalities” of participation: conditional (you get the cash, but you have to participate in certain social programs), unconditional (you get the cash with no strings attached), limited (if you earn extra income through work, that reduces the amount of cash you get), and non-limited (extra income does not reduce the amount of cash).
Preliminary results showed that the effects varied a bit depending on the different modalities. But across the board, the basic income boosted life satisfaction and mental health while making participants neither more likely nor less likely to find employment.
With the arrival of Covid-19, the Spanish government launched a website in June offering payments of up to 1,015 euros ($1,145) to the poorest families in the country — some 850,000 households. The government isn’t running this initiative as a research study per se (there’s no control group), but it will continue to monitor the results and says it aims to keep the initiative going even after the pandemic-induced recession ends.
In 2017, Utrecht and a few surrounding cities kicked off a basic income experiment with 250 recipients as part of a randomized controlled trial. Some recipients got the money (around $1,050 per month) unconditionally, while others had to do volunteer work. The researchers’ aim is to figure out which way of delivering the financial assistance works best.
In 2011, Iran rolled out a nationwide unconditional cash transfer program to compensate for the phase-out of subsidies on bread, water, electricity, heating, and fuel. The government gave out sizable monthly payments to each family: 29 percent of the median household income on average.
The program was later dialed back as some Iranians came to believe it was disincentivizing people to work. Yet economists found that “the program did not affect labor supply in any appreciable way.” The program is still running, and it’s the only such program in the world to run nationwide.
The largest and longest UBI experiment in the world is taking place in Kenya, where the charity GiveDirectly is making payments to more than 20,000 people spread out across 245 rural villages. As part of this randomized controlled trial, which started in 2016, recipients receive roughly 75 cents per adult per day, delivered monthly for 12 years.
Some preliminary results will be available soon. In the meantime, we’ve already seen that in another GiveDirectly program in Kenya, cash transfers have stimulated the economy and benefited not only the recipients themselves but also people in nearby villages.
Samson, 72, at his home in the Bondo region of Kenya, on October 3, 2018. Samson receives $22 a month from the American NGO GiveDirectly. AFP via Getty Images
Between 2008 and 2009, all residents below the age of 60 living in the Otjivero-Omitara region of Namibia received a basic income: 100 Namibian dollars ($6.75) per person per month, no strings attached, regardless of their socioeconomic status. Funding came from private donors in Namibia and around the world.
As a result, child malnutrition dropped and school enrollment rates went up, while poverty-related crime (like theft) fell, according to reports from BIEN and the Center for Public Impact. However, a lack of alignment with the national government meant that the pilot project was never rolled out nationwide.
Between 2011 and 2012, a pilot project in the state of Madhya Pradesh gave a basic income to some 6,000 Indians. The project, coordinated by the Self-Employed Women’s Association and funded by Unicef, included two studies.
In the first study, every man, woman, and child in eight villages received a monthly payment: 200 rupees ($2.80) for adults and 100 rupees for each child (paid to the guardian). After one year, the payments increased to 300 and 150 rupees, respectively. Meanwhile, 12 similar villages received no basic income, acting as a control group.
In the second study, one tribal village received an income of 300 rupees per adult and 150 rupees per child for the entire trial. Another tribal village acted as a control.
The results: Receiving a basic income led to improved sanitation, nutrition, and school attendance.
An Indian family walk by a barber shop in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, India, on February 1, 2012. EyesWideOpen/Getty Images
In 2011, following years of budget surpluses and under pressure to help poor and elderly people, Hong Kong tried out a program called Scheme $6,000. All adults with a valid Hong Kong permanent identity card — some 6 million people — were eligible to receive a one-time giveaway of HK$6,000 ($772) each. The public had a host of complaints about the program — for example, that administrative costs were eating up too much of the money that could go to citizens — and it only lasted one year. However, it was briefly revived in 2018 thanks to another budget surplus and round of pressure to help the needy.
Macao, an autonomous region on the south coast of China, has been experimenting with basic income since 2008, when it began giving small but unconditional transfers to all residents — around 700,000 people — as part of a Wealth Partaking Scheme. Each year, local residents get around 9,000 patacas ($1,128) and nonpermanent residents get around 5,400 patacas ($672). Unfortunately, critics say these sums are too paltry to make a real dent in poverty.
Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa announced in a January 1 tweet that he would give away 1 billion Japanese yen — about $9 million — to 1,000 random Twitter followers. His stated goal was to test the premise of a basic income. “It’s a serious social experiment,” he said.
Since the money was distributed in April, each recipient has had to fill out follow-up surveys asking what impact the cash has had on their lives. The initial survey results show that recipients of the cash benefit are now 3.9 times more interested in launching a new business. Recipients saw a decrease in divorce rates, from 1.5 percent to 0.6 percent. And more than 70 percent of recipients said they experienced a significant increase in happiness.
Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter and we’ll send you a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling the world’s biggest challenges — and how to get better at doing good.
Future Perfect is funded in part by individual contributions, grants, and sponsorships. Learn more here.
You’ve read 1 article in the last month
Here at Vox, we believe in helping everyone understand our complicated world, so that we can all help to shape it. Our mission is to create clear, accessible journalism to empower understanding and action.
If you share our vision, please consider supporting our work by becoming a Vox Member. Your support ensures Vox a stable, independent source of funding to underpin our journalism. If you are not ready to become a Member, even small contributions are meaningful in supporting a sustainable model for journalism.
Thank you for being part of our community.
