REINVENTING SOCIAL WELFARE
Tilburg University (lead), Maastricht University
Various innovative welfare state solutions have been proposed to ensure that tech revolutions do not lead to mass unemployment, poverty and mounting inequality. An increasing number of authors argue for the introduction of some form of basic income, but the empirical evidence on the effectiveness and possible adverse social and economic effects remains scarce. Many more countries than ever before show interest in the ideas and are preparing or already implementing local or national experiments with some form of a participation or basic income, either unconditional ones (like in the US, Canada, Scotland and Finland) or conditional ones (like in the Netherlands, France, Italy and again Finland).
Discussions on basic income programs often tend to be ideological rather than empirical. In this work package, TECHNEQUALITY will move beyond arguing from normative perspectives, and aims to uncover what the intended and unintended consequences of social welfare solutions to technological unemployment are. This project fills in the existing gap in our knowledge by providing new experimental evidence on the implementation of a variety of local and national field experiments on the introduction of participation (PI) and basic income (BI) programs, and by studying the current empirical evidence on the social, motivational and micro-economic effects of various PI and BI programs.