Abstract
De Wispelaere, Halmetoja and Pulkka describe how in 2015 a newly-elected centre-right coalition government committed to launching a Basic Income experiment. Since then, Finland has been propelled onto the global stage, and portrayed as one of the leaders in Basic Income policy development. The authors describe the specifics of the Basic Income experiment—its design and implementation features, the background to the government’s decision, and the several decades of public and political debate surrounding the Basic Income proposal that preceded that decision—and they reflect on the lessons to be learned for social security policy development in Finland, and in the wider Basic Income policy community.
We are grateful to John Baker, Joe Chrisp, Markus Kanerva, Pertti Koistinen and Miska Simanainen for comments and suggestions. All remaining mistakes are our own. Jurgen De Wispelaere gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Economic Security Project and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) (PTDC/FER-FIL/28078/2017).
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De Wispelaere, J., Halmetoja, A., Pulkka, VV. (2019). The Finnish Basic Income Experiment: A Primer. In: Torry, M. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income. Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23614-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23614-4_20
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