Contemporary Pilot Schemes and Proposed Models of UBI

Building on chapter four’s history of the idea of UBI, chapter five provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary universal basic income (UBI) models and pilot schemes. Given the long history of models that have not come to fruition, it is important also to analyse examples of where UBI has actually been put in practice. Pilot studies are thus a useful means of providing empirical evidence for researchers but also can, if they are in any way successful, be used as exemplars. Extrapolating what are generally local schemes to a wider population is not without its drawbacks, but nonetheless pilots can tell us much about how the receipt of an unconditional basic income might shape people’s behaviour for good or ill. For this reason, while the chapter engages in intellectual discussions about different types of models and how they might be funded, it focuses on the following four contemporary cases: a basic income pilot in Madhya Pradesh in 2011–12; Bolsa Família and other Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes in Brazil from 2003 to the time of writing; GiveDirectly’s ongoing UBI programme in Kenya; the 2017–2018 pilot partial UBI for 2000 Finnish residents. The lessons that can be learned from these contemporary experiments are identified and discussed, with the positive aspects of these pilots being utilised in the arguments for the introduction of a UBI that animate the remaining two chapters.