560 euros per month for two years : Finland will test the universal income – LCI

TEST – Since 1 January, the Finland tries to the universal allowance For two years, 2000 unemployed persons will receive a basic income monthly of 560 euros.

Would this be the first stone of a large building ? Finland tests since January 1, the virtues of the basic income, also called the “universal allowance”, a first at the national level in Europe. For two years, 2000 unemployed persons selected will affect the amount of 560 euros per month, and whatever other money coming in.

In 2017 and 2018, the State will compare the trajectory of the 2000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58 years were selected at random and forced to participate in the experiment, with that of a “group-test” of the unemployed reaching approximately the same amount in social security benefits “classics”. Objective : to know if, as the think the government, the unemployed persons receiving the basic income will be more motivated to find a job or start a business knowing that they will keep their basic income.

The project was part of the electoral promises of the Prime minister’s centrist Juha Sipilä, in office since may 2015. The government is hoping to “promote employment” and “reduce the bureaucracy and simplify the complex system of social aid”. Former business man at the head of a government of the centre-right pro-austerity, Juha Sipilä is convinced that it would encourage the Finns to be more enterprising and mobile, and that the reform responds to changes in the labour market, the more unstable.

Without being hostile to the idea, the opposition felt that the test was to scale too limited and in a country of 5.5 million inhabitants, to deliver lessons decisive. Not to mention that an allocation of 560 euros is not possible to live very meanly in Finland, where the net disposable income on average exceeds 2200 euros per person and per month, according to the OECD. But the country is the first in Europe to test the extent at the national level.

The basic income is a radical reform which has its supporters on the left as well, among those who call the welfare State to ensure to all a decent standard of living, than among liberals, who see in the device the possibility of review of the social protection. In France, Manuel Valls, Benoit Hamon, Yannick Jadot, or Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, for example, have declared support for such a measure.