From Finland’s high-tech businesses through to an extensive network of regional co-ops that ensure that there are banks, stores and other services within two miles of residents throughout the year, there are co-owned services in every sector stretching right across a country 40% larger than the UK.

We have much to learn from countries like Finland and, across Europe, there has been a welcome strengthening of trade relations and contact between the 160,000 co-op enterprises which provide jobs for 5.4 million European citizens.

My recent trip to Finland coincided with the start of the Lapland tourist season: the plane that brought me there boasted a seven metre high picture of Santa Claus on the tail. But I was there for a more prosaic reason, visiting some of the country’s leading co-operative enterprises.

It was mid-afternoon and already dark in the capital city of Helsinki by the time I met Taavi Heikkilä, chief executive of the SOK Corporation (also known as the “S Group”), who filled me in on his organisation’s progress towards creating a co-operative economy.

As in the UK, there are employee-owned co-ops and customer-owned co-ops in Finland. The S Group’s retail co-ops are customer-owned, with 1,646 food and grocery stores and 42,000 staff. Over the last 30 years the S Group has grown from around 20% market share and the third largest retailer in the country to be the market leader, with just over 45% market share. Co-operatives in the group now cover an unusually wide range of consumer services, from cars and fuel through to department stores, hotels and restaurants.

My counterpart Sami Karhu, of the Pellervo Society, reports that the co-operative business sector more widely includes 161 co-operative banks, 20 co-operative insurance companies and a range of water, forestry and farmer co-operatives. The longest running of these date back close to the start of the first co-ops in Finland in 1899, launched as part of a movement to strengthen Finnish society in the face of threats from Russia. From these humble starts, co-op banks, diaries and shops opened in almost every community in the country. The movement’s founder Hannes Gebhard described it as “the peaceful endeavor of the underprivileged to improve their lot by their own efforts, joined together.”

Finland was later described by its Nobel Prize winning scientist A I Vertanen as an economy based on mutuality: “We have no Rockefellers or Carnegies, but we do have co-operatives,” he said. This tradition continues to spread some seven decades later.

The lessons for the UK are encouraging. At a time when the closure rate for rural shops and banks is increasing, the Finns have developed and sustained vibrant community-owned model for sustainable rural outlets that integrate different services, including food, petrol and banking. By combining services in a format that is shaped by local communities and responds to local needs, but with the scale and distribution of a national chain, Finnish co-ops are finding new ways to sustain more distant regional economies.

Finnish customer-owned retailers have won market share by making membership something that is meaningful, rather reproducing another consumer loyalty scheme. They are using data and new technologies to support the close relationship, and give a sense of ownership.

The S Group’s Heikkilä explains: “In the past a retailer knew all its customers and their needs personally. Today, customer proximity means new solutions.” Customers want easy and smooth shopping and a quick interactive service and the S Group has focused on digital services to offer just that. “We see digital mobile retail as the customer’s remote control to the co-operative”, he adds.

Today, the number of co-operative enterprises in Finland stands at 4,626. While Nokia, the leading Finnish company, has been knocked back and the economy has the strains shared by Eurozone nations, there is a fresh wave of co-ops: one new co-operative enterprise starts up every working day of the year. These organisations extended the co-operative model of member to include non-traditional areas such as woodlands, energy supply, consumer and business broadband and telecoms.

Here in the UK, the Lincolnshire Co-operative Society is looking to try something similar, with experiments that combine libraries, pharmacies and post offices – each of which might be a marginal business, but together could attract sufficient footfall to sustain a village outlet. In Waddington, the library is nested within a pharmacy and operates with 15 volunteers, including one local author.

Although many retail consumer co-operatives in the UK are owned by millions of their customers, most people wouldn’t know it. Over time, the relationship between co-ops and their members and consumers has become a far more thin connection than when dividends were high and the decision makers were all local.

The larger co-operatives, such as Co-operative Group, Central England and Scotmid, are now talking actively about member engagement and so-called meaningful membership. Let’s hope we take a leaf out of the Finnish book.

Ed Mayo is secretary general of Co-operatives UK and a vice-president of Co-operatives Europe

Originally published in The Guardian

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A year later, the Kumpula exchange rink, renamed the Helsinki Timebank, began to attract more citizens who wanted to participate in this satisfying alternative economy known as timebanking. The main principle of timebanking is that everyone’s time, work and needs are of equal worth. One hour of babysitting is equal to one hour of helping an elderly neighbor or providing accounting services. It is fair to say that this essential principle of timebanking stands in stark contrast to the premises of the current money system and capitalist markets, which value everyone’s time and effort in highly unequal ways. Timebanking provides an alternative by helping people meet important personal and household needs in more socially satisfying, equal ways.

By 2014 some 3,000 members had registered with the Helsinki Timebank, and more than one-third had participated in at least one exchange. To date, some 19,000 total hours have been exchanged through the Helsinki Timebank, which includes internal work to maintain and develop the timebank. Worldwide there are thousands of timebanks that enable individuals and diverse types of organizations to exchange services, and sometimes goods, according to timebanking’s principles. The Timebank is a part of the Community Exchange System (www.ces.org.za), which lets people exchange goods and services without money or markets. (The network hosts timebanks and local currencies, facilitating “intertrading” among them.)

Timebanks are often seen as irrelevant to the “real economy” because they are not dealing with “economic issues” or markets. They tend to be described as self-help tools, as solvers of certain social problems, as charities, and as a new form of volunteering. They are seen as platforms for people to develop skills and exchange nonprofessional services while strengthening their sense of community connection. Yet in meeting real needs without money while building what economists call “social capital,” timebanks deserve to be taken every bit as seriously as markets.

Developing Currency into a Commons

Since its founding, Helsinki Timebank has striven to be a platform of deliberation. It is managed by a core group, open to all members, which discusses how to develop the timebank and meet ongoing challenges. All larger and substantial decisions are made in consultation with all Timebank members, or by voting. For instance, the decision to convert the local exchange rink into Helsinki Timebank in 2010 and to name its local currency “Tovi” (Finnish for “a moment”) was made through a membership vote.

When a large cosmetic firm with its own exchange rink wanted to join Helsinki Timebank, it provoked spirited discussion about what kinds of services and relations should be supported and how to define the Timebank’s boundaries. Inspired by the example of the Solidarity Economy movement, members in May 2013 drafted the Helsinki Timebank’s ABC, a statement of its values and working principles. The ABC defines the Timebank as a platform for “reciprocity, We-spirit, ecological sustainability, economic justice, and local and participatory culture,” among other principles that guide participants in deciding what types of organizations may join Helsinki Timebank.

When a local food cooperative wanted to join Helsinki Timebank, it was a perfect fit – and an ingenious way to blend the local market with the credit currency. The cooperative makes locally produced food available to people with time-credits – and in return it gains access to the community and resources for which time-credits can be exchanged.

Another example of commoning can be found in the “Time Heals Network,” which grew out of Helsinki Timebank.¹  This peer-to-peer network offers emotional support to people when their lives take a turn for the worse; the services are credited to the providers in time-credits. Peer supporters themselves may have acquired their expertise through formal education, employment or life experiences. The system is based on reciprocity – sometimes one helps someone else, sometimes one receives help. The network also uses the timebank to help people meet concrete needs like housekeeping and childcare.

The time currency in itself, the Tovi, is not a commodity, but a token in a “credit commons” that allows people to exchange services, earning and spending credits. The process of defining the principles and rules of the credit currency is itself a process of commoning, a term used by historian Peter Linebaugh in discussing medieval English commons. In this sense, Helsinki Timebank’s time credits function as a pedagogical tool that helps people learn about cooperation and organization. Strangers are able to meet each other and develop new ways of relating to each other. Thanks to a timebank, the valuable human skills that people have – even among people outside of the labor market, such as the elderly and disabled – can be made visible and put to good use. Timebanks help people reproduce ordinary life without the mediation of markets. A timebank as such is a platform for commoning.²

One major act of commoning at Helsinki Timebank was the development of an internal taxation mechanism. When the provider of a service receives time-credits, a percentage of the time-credits earned are automatically transferred to the account of an ethical economic actor of choice in the Helsinki Timebank; this could be a food cooperative, another local CSA, or the Time Heals Network, for example. The time-tax function lets Timebank members strengthen actors and organizations that exemplify the values listed in the ABC. It also supports work that is important to timebank members, and strengthens and develops the community. In a larger context the time-tax and time-credit can be seen as ways that Helsinki Timebank supports solidarity economy-building and the commons in Finland.

Facing the Challenge of State Policy

At the end of 2013, Finland tax authorities came out with new taxation guidelines that required taxing skilled work services received through timebanks according to their market value (in euros). Helsinki Timebank contested this decision, arguing that it destroys the essential principle of equality at the heart of timebanking. It called for an exemption from euro taxation so that the actual potential of timebanking in Finland – including also the benefits of the (internal) time-tax – could be assessed. The dialogue was opened between Helsinki Timebank and the City of Helsinki in 2014 and is still continuing.

The struggle that Helsinki Timebank now faces is to maintain its autonomy as a deliberative commons guided by strong ethical values while securing formal legal recognition and respect in Finnish society. One initiative seeks to find ways for the City of Helsinki to recognize the Timebank’s internal time-tax and incorporate it into the local economy. If successful, the time-tax could be used to support many different forms of coproduction (between timebankers and the city). It could also be used to start up all kinds of autonomous creative projects as commons, creating services or goods that are deemed important by both the city and timebank members. Importantly, this could open up new forms of power transfer and sharing within the city – a commonification of the public sector!³

An interesting future question is whether timebanking could be used as a tool for ethical entrepreneurs to share common resources and gain relative autonomy from markets. This would help the new economy strengthen commons and reduce dependence on highly capitalized markets and competition. Unfortunately, in Finland, this road is now blocked by rigid taxation guidelines that prevent the exchange of professional services via timebanks. It would appear that the guidelines are intended to prevent timebanking from growing and challenging the dominance of both market and state, and the capitalistic order itself.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

About the authors

Jukka Peltokoski (Finland) is a political researcher and pedagogue, an activist in the precarity movement, a commoner in Commons.

Niklas Toivakainen (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity economy collective.

Tero Toivanen (Finland) is a doctoral student in World Politics at the University of Helsinki.

Ruby van der Wekken (Finland) is an active member of Helsinki Timebank, and a member of Commons.fi and the Finnish Solidarity Economy collective.

Photo by pni

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Pixelache Festival in Suvilahti cultural complex, Helsinki, 22nd-24th September 2017

Pixelache Festival happens in and around Oranssi‘s Valvomo building, in Suvilahti cultural complex Helsinki, 22nd-24th September 2017. The festival activities aim to reflect on decentralisation of power by collectively designing the programme and building its venue in 2018.

After the 2015 festival that travelled through public and private Living Spaces, and the 2016 festival delving deep into Interfaces for Empathy, Pixelache Helsinki festival 2017 gathers stories of local & decentralised governance. Tapping into the shift from centralised-capital based economies to decentralised peer-based resource distribution, we offer the festival as a meeting point for local initiatives working on similar experiences, as well as a forum to plan a future together. In this way we build and expand upon our experience of Camp Pixelache past events, where the festival content was shaped together, and Open Source Festivals project, where knowledge about production was shared.

The 2017 festival edition is titled Local & Decentralised and it hosts an assembly to reflect on decentralisation of power in different fields. Local and decentralised governance seems to happen when collective design and a tangible group effort come together. In order to materialize the festival theme itself, reflecting perhaps on the current construction of Helsinki city and how buildings relate with their environment and the needs of inhabitants, during the festival in 2017 we aim to form an assembly inviting the local community into the collective design of a public venue and the content for the 2018 edition of the festival.

In 2017 the festival activities will happen in and next to Oranssi premises from 22.9 to 24.9. The role of Oranssi organisation, of Suvilahti permanent tenants, and of Pixelache members’ contributions is an important as part of the main program in 2017, for the identity of Local & Decentralised, and as a trigger for the activities in 2018.

The 2018 iteration of Pixelache festival is also committed to take place again in Suvilahti, featuring a collaboratively-built venue next to existing DIY areas such as the skate-park. The new spatial and conceptual configurations, made together with the festival participants over two festival editions, aim to create fluid places where collaborative knowledge is applied, and where new ideas emerge for future cooperations.

Major developments of decentralization can and do occur: currency, energy, resources, and feelings are being decentralised and distributed. These developments bring about problems that cannot be solved on a purely conceptual level; they need to be embodied and lived through for a shift to yet different models. Thus fear of the unforeseen and unpredictable must also be addressed.

From the festival activities stories emerge that depict how governance functions between civil society, individual initiatives and government, and also how citizens themselves connect into structures where governance happens locally, and where we can come to terms with inefficiencies, passivity, interests, time, jargon.

How is it possible to express a multiplicity of will, is the present practice of a State effective enough to convey it? Often the movements towards local and decentralised structures are related to privatisation in economical models, how can diverse collective interest meet on economical terms? Can we be local and decentralised and yet be connected globally, micro-organisms breathing within a vast complex macro system?

Local & Decentralised festival does not let you down, it will be your local event to differentiate consensus from silence: talking of ecological issues, promoting visual culture as a shield against pessimism, presenting how democracy benefits from digital media -or not, playing games to prove that we are as connected as we are, offering workshops to learn again the pleasure of learning things together, finding music and contemporary art that make sense more than science, and divulging science as creative as drama.

The festival is free entrance and suitable for families, you are welcome to share food and bring your towel for sauna.

VENUES, PLACES AND SCHEDULE

— Local & Decentralised festival program at Oranssi and MUU Galleria

From 22.9 to 24.9.2017 – Festival and Public Assembly at Oranssi, Valvomo building in Suvilahti.

From 21.9. To 26.9.2017 – Exhibition ‘Pixelache and Koelse 15 years’ curated by Antti Ahonen, at MUU Galleria, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki.

— Pixelache Helsinki 2018 festival preliminary program at Suvilahti

From 13.9 to 19.9.2018 – Construction site for the Decentralised venue at skate-park, next to Valvomo building in Suvilahti.

From 21.9 to 23.9.2018 – Festival activities both at Oranssi, Valvomo building, and at the Decentralised venue, close to skate park
next to Valvomo.

Consult map of Suvilahti area.

CONTACT FESTIVAL DIRECTORS

Egle Oddo, egle [-ät-] pixelache.ac

Local & Decentralised festival is supported by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the City of Helsinki Cultural Office, and Svenska kulturfonden.

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Finland’s UBI experiment serves as a cautionary tale for basic income proponents on the Left.

Earlier this month, Finland launched its much-anticipated universal basic income (UBI) experiment. Media accounts of the new program have been roundly glowing, a fact not lost on Finnish leaders looking to build up the country’s image as Socially Innovative Finland.

Much of this positive international attention is justified. Finland is on the bleeding edge of an increasingly popular idea about how the welfare state should evolve. But Finland’s experiment has its dark sides as well, especially for those who are concerned that a poorly designed UBI could undercut the welfare state without truly liberating anyone.

The technical details of Finland’s UBI experiment are straightforward. Kela, the country’s social insurance agency, randomly selected two thousand Finnish citizens between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-eight who were receiving benefits from either the basic unemployment allowance or the labor market subsidy program. Typically, people enrolled in these two programs have been unemployed for long periods of time and therefore do not qualify for benefits from Finland’s more generous earnings-related unemployment benefit system.

Those chosen for the UBI experiment will receive €560 ($590) per month, an amount that effectively replaces the payments from the basic unemployment allowance and labor market subsidy. Unlike benefits from those two programs, however, Kela will dispense the UBI unconditionally for the next two years, meaning that recipients will continue to receive benefits even if they take up work.

Finnish prime minister Juha Sipilä. FinnishGovernment / Flickr

The politics of the UBI experiment, as well as the story of how it came to be, are more complicated. While announced late last year, the UBI pilot program has its origins in a Centre Party platform plank that, after the 2015 parliamentary election, turned into an ambitious UBI experiment — only to be redesigned and pared back to create the pilot.

How that evolution happened, and the political fractures the UBI revealed along the way, should serve as a warning to the UBI’s left-wing proponents.

How the UBI Came to Be

In the six years leading up to Finland’s 2015 parliamentary election, the country’s labor market was rocked by a double-dip recession.

The global financial crisis of 2007–8 pushed Finland’s unemployment rate up from 6.4 percent in 2008 to 8.4 percent in 2009. Then, following a period of employment gains in 2011 and 2012, joblessness began climbing again in 2013 on the weakness of the country’s flagging electronics and paper industries. In 2014, Russia, one of Finland’s major trade partners, fell into a deep recession thanks to collapsing oil prices and international sanctions resulting from its annexation of Crimea. This depressed the Finnish economy even further, causing the unemployment rate to rise to 9.6 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, the moribund economy pushed the government debt level up from 40 percent of GDP in 2008 to 75 percent of GDP in 2015.

During the 2015 election, the Centre Party ran primarily on a platform of public debt reduction and job creation. Party chair Juha Sipilä promised to usher in reforms that would create two hundred thousand new private-sector jobs and boost the country’s employment rate from 68 percent to 72 percent. With more people in the workforce, Centre leaders argued, Finland could “stop living in debt.” Centre’s program set out to achieve its policy goals chiefly by reducing the country’s unit labor costs, liberalizing regulations, and increasing the retirement age.

Included among Centre’s job creation ideas were two sparse sentences signaling the party’s interest in conducting a UBI experiment: “Social security needs to be developed to secure the basic subsistence for each person as well as to encourage people to seek and accept work. The impact of a universal basic income system must be tested and developed through regional trials.”

For Centre, the UBI was about increasing employment by reducing the “welfare traps” that discourage people from working. It was not about giving workers the ability to exit employment or about reducing income inequality and poverty.

Centre won the 2015 election, securing 21 percent of the vote. Closely behind Centre were the conservative National Coalition Party (NCP) and the ethno-nationalist Finns Party, both of whom won about 18 percent. Shortly after the election, Centre — which has entered both left-leaning and right-leaning coalition governments in the past — announced that it had formed a bourgeois government, with Sipilä as prime minister and NCP and the Finns as junior partners.

Upon taking power, Sipilä got to work implementing the various proposals in Centre’s jobs platform. After months of tense negotiations that crescendoed in a nationwide strike, the prime minister convinced most of the country’s labor and employer organizations to sign a competitiveness pact that cut unit labor costs by around 5 percent; liberalized store hour regulations (allowing shops to stay open as late as they want); and passed pension reforms that raise the retirement age to sixty-five by 2027.

Sipilä also followed through on the party’s proposed UBI experiment. In the fall of 2015, the prime minister’s office called for researchers to submit bids to lead a national UBI pilot. A consortium of researchers headed by the welfare agency Kela secured the project. By late October, the researchers had begun reviewing the history of UBI experiments around the world and preparing basic income models for the Finnish trial.

By January 2016, the Kela researchers had finished their initial review, and in March, they published their recommendations for the Finnish UBI experiment. The research group initially proposed paying out a basic income to a random sample of 1,500 low-earning adults between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-three. The plan included a national sample as well as a regionally intensive sample intended to examine the effects of a UBI on the broader community. All participants would receive at least €550, but some would be allotted €600 or €700 (in order to study the effects of different UBI amounts). Crucially, the researchers’ proposal included workers and non-workers alike.

But when the government released the draft of its UBI experiment legislation last August, it was clear they’d found little to like in the researchers’ ambitious proposal. The regionally intensive sample had been eliminated; the varied payment amounts had been nixed; and the target population of all low-earning adults between twenty-five and sixty-three had been replaced with a new target population: all unemployed adults between twenty-five and fifty-eight who receive a basic unemployment allowance or labor market subsidy.

Just in case its intentions weren’t apparent, the government reaffirmed that the “primary goal of the basic income experiment is related to promoting employment.” As far as Centre was concerned, there was no reason to include low-earning adults already working or adults out of the labor force for reasons other than unemployment.

In December, the government’s UBI experiment was enacted into law. By early January — after Kela randomly selected two thousand people from its unemployment rolls and informed them of their mandatory participation in the experiment — the government had made its first monthly UBI payment.

And just like that, what started as the dream proposal of left-leaning wonks everywhere had, once filtered through the political process, mutated into the UBI-as-workhouse nightmare.

Politics of UBI in Finland

The Centre Party’s interest in the UBI did not form spontaneously in 2015. Various political groups in Finland have promoted the idea of a UBI since at least the 1980s, with the Left Alliance and the Green League leading the charge. In 2002 and 2015, opinion polls generally showed that the majority of members in each political party had a favorable view of a UBI.

The most recent polling on the topic, conducted in early 2016 after the government’s UBI experiment had been announced, provides a more detailed look at the partisan breakdown of UBI support. According to this survey, 51 percent of Finns back the idea of a basic income, but that support varies considerably across party affiliations and life status.

Members of the Left Alliance and Green League are by far the most enthusiastic — as they have been for as long as pollsters have been asking the question. The Left/Green faction, which skews young in Finland, promotes the UBI as a way of enabling people to pursue more autonomous personal projects by providing an income detached from the labor market and by reducing the state’s bureaucratic control over the unemployed and low-income wage earners. Although their pro-UBI rhetoric has differed from the government’s, the benefit levels espoused by the Left Alliance and Green League have been pretty close to the levels used in the current UBI experiment — ranging from Green League’s €560 per month to Left Alliance’s €620.

Not surprisingly — and in keeping with past polling — the National Coalition Party registers the least support for a UBI. The NCP is primarily the party of the conservative business and professional class. Its leaders have openly expressed fears that the UBI is a radical left plot to encourage able-bodied people to drop out of the workforce.

Perhaps more puzzling is the relative antipathy among Social Democrats, the traditional party of the welfare state. But they are also the traditional party of organized labor, which is where their skepticism of the UBI originates.

In Finland, unions are responsible for managing the country’s unemployment funds and benefit payouts. One of the reasons union density is so high is because workers must be union members to be covered by an unemployment fund. Replacing the current earnings-related unemployment benefit with a meager UBI would thus reduce the income security of unemployed workers and reduce the strength of organized labor, both of which are naturally anathema to the country’s historic workers’ party.

Despite being the party behind the current UBI experiment, Centre’s membership is quite divided on the issue, as their ideological orientation would predict. To the extent that Centre does support a UBI, it is as a tool to promote employment and encourage workers to take bad jobs with low pay. Another source of support is small-scale entrepreneurs from rural areas, a strong voter base for the party. Historically, these small business operators have had a hard time navigating Finland’s out-of-work benefits system, which was originally set up with wage-earners in mind. Finally, Sipilä, Centre’s leader, is a wealthy businessman with close ties to Finland’s tech sector, a community that’s touted a UBI in recent years.

In sum, then, the Finnish political landscape around the UBI has fractured in a fairly discouraging way. On the right side of the spectrum, there is an idiosyncratic ethno-nationalist party whose position on the UBI is mostly incoherent, a skeptical conservative party that is mostly opposed, and a centrist party whose membership is split on the idea and whose leadership is interested but for all the wrong reasons.

On the Left, the traditional party of workers and the welfare state remains worried that any real UBI policy would undermine unions and social insurance, while the far left adores the kind of liberatory UBI that looks nothing like the actual UBI experiment the government ultimately approved.

A Cautionary Tale

It would be wrong to draw too many conclusions from the Finns’ UBI experience. It is just one experiment, and the researchers involved have already started pushing for additional trials that are broader in scope. Determining what, if any, positive employment effects a UBI might have is a worthwhile endeavor.

Yet the form the Finnish UBI experiment has taken, and the way it came to be, should trouble UBI supporters on the Left.

It is technically possible to create a broad-based UBI that increases worker bargaining power and leisure while decreasing inequality and poverty, especially in a wealthy country like the United States.

But it is just as possible to redirect the energy behind a liberatory UBI into implementing a conservative one — forcing unemployed workers into bad jobs while undermining organized labor, earnings equality, and the welfare state.

Indeed, it is even possible to pull off such a bait-and-switch while convincing the rest of the world that you are engaged in progressive policymaking.

Photo by archer10 (Dennis) 88M Views

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“The government has set aside 20 million euros for two years for the experiment. There are several options that the working group will consider. The first is a full basic income, where the amount paid to participants would be high enough to replace “almost all insurance-based benefits”, hence a significant monthly sum. As in other European welfare states, Finland has an insurance system where workers receive their unemployment and pension benefits from sector-specific funds. These are usually higher than the basic benefits administered to welfare beneficiaries regardless of their occupational status. The figure of 800 euros per month circulated by many news outlets is to be read as a possibility under this option, rather than anything set in stone.

The second option is a partial basic income that would replace basic benefits, but leave intact almost all existing insurance-based benefits. The presentation notes that, in this case, the monthly sum should not be lower than the existing level of basic benefits, which is around 550 euros per month. The same figure was reported in several media without the appropriate context.

A third option is that of a negative income tax, where income transfers are made through the taxation system. Other models might also be considered, including the option of a participation income given to unemployed people as an incentive to seek additional income – this alternative is discussed by Kangas himself and Jan Otto Andersson in a 2002 paper.

The size of the sample and the geographical areas covered are other key topics to be addressed. According to Kela, the next step will be the delivery of a review of available evidence from universal basic income models tested in other countries, which will be presented to government in spring 2016. In a recent survey carried out by Kela, nearly 70% of respondents support the idea of a universal basic income, and most of them think it should be set at around 1000 euros per month.”

Photo by stanjourdan

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