The experiment was limited to 2,000 unemployed people for two years. Its results are frequently cited by both supporters and critics of UBI; the atlas marks the question of large-scale labour-supply effects as disputed.
What Finland's basic income experiment did — and did not — show
Unconditional payments to unemployed people had small employment effects and improved wellbeing; the design cannot tell us what a universal scheme would do.
Polity Atlas editorsPublished 2 Feb 2026 · 1 min read