After the official "no" from Switzerland, which arrived via referendum, and while the discussion is flaring up in various countries including Italy, the first country in Europe that is preparing to experiment - at a national level - the basic income is the Finland. Prime Minister Juha Sipilä had promised it and now the bill is being examined by a sort of popular consultation, which will end on 9 September.
The test predicts that 2.000 people, drawn at random and of working age, will receive 560 euros a month from the State. The "basic income" was designed in the Scandinavian country above all with the intention, as reported by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, of "reducing bureaucracy and simplifying the complex system of social aid". The prime minister, elected in May 2015 but who had previously been an entrepreneur, claims that this measure can also relaunch the employment market.
The exact opposite of what Swiss politicians and voters assessed, that last June 77% said No to basic income, which was to be 2.300 a month (2.500 Swiss francs): according to them, a basic income could discourage citizens from looking for a job. The measure, which in the current state of affairs would be unlikely to be feasible in highly indebted countries such as Italy, however already has a virtuous precedent in the world: in India, where basic income has been introduced locally in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
According to the economic indicators, in the province of Central India, which has 73 million inhabitants, the quality of life seems to have improved, in particular a strong recovery in consumption was recorded. Other examples are those of the city of Utrecht and the experiment conducted by Y Combinator, a startup incubator of the Silicon Valley, which already announced in June that it would test the basic income on a hundred families in Oakland, California, who will receive between 1.000 and 2.000 dollars a month for a period of between six months and a year. "The basic income is used by people to satisfy their needs, but we don't know if this is the best solution: that's why we want to test it", they say from Silicon Valley.
However, even in the United States, at a national level, the project is practically unfeasible: calculating it on a contribution of 10.000 dollars a year (lower than that thought by Y Combinator), it would cost the State coffers almost 3.000 billion a year. The objective of the Finnish Prime Minister Juha Sipilä is however to include the experimentation in the 2017 Stability Law and thus trigger it from 1 January next year.
