Canadian Basic Income experiments - MINCOME

Between 1974 and 1979 Canada carried out a basic income-experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba called MINCOME. The experiment ended in 1979 with no final report and no analysis of data from the saturation site. Until 2009 the documents remained under wraps. Just recently Evelyn Forget (Forget, 2011) from the University of Manitoba started interpreting and evaluating the files. The hitherto known findings surprise: The number of hours worked decreased in men by only 1 percent, among wives by 3 percent and among unmarried women by 5 percent. A considerable reduction in working hours was only seen among young mothers and there was a significant increase in young people who went to school longer completing the 12th grade. In the health sector, the number of hospitalizations due to accidents, domestic violence and mental health problems decreased by 8.5 percent.

The feared labour market fallout - that people would stop working - didn’t materialize. Part of this was

by design, says Forget (Mallett, 2015). ”Mincome was designed in such a way that there is always an incentive to work more hours rather than less”, because every dollar received from other sources would reduce benefits by only fifty cents, whereas typical welfare programs provide no extra benefits when recipients earn money from other sources. When working additional hours MINCOME

let participants keep 50 percent of the benefit they would have gotten anyway, so people were better off working than not.