BIEN entered its fourth decade with a closed bank account. It leaves it with a global definition, a generation of experiments, and a sovereign state paying a recurring income. The distance between those moments explains what the network became.
In 2016, the idea of basic income looked healthier than the institution carrying its global name.
That June, Switzerland held the world’s first national referendum on an unconditional basic income. The proposal lost by a wide margin, with 23.1 percent voting yes, but more than half a million people had backed an idea that had spent decades outside ordinary politics. A movement that once struggled to find a meeting room could now point to a national ballot.
Inside the Basic Income Earth Network, Malcolm Torry found a less celebratory story. BIEN had invited him to join its Executive Committee. He studied the organization before answering and initially refused.
"The bank account had been closed by the bank," Torry recalled for BIEN’s 40th-anniversary oral-history project. BIEN had "a chaotic constitution," remained registered in Belgium without anyone properly administering the entity, and had been fined for breaking Belgian tax law. "The future looked bleak."
Then he took on the problem. Torry became BIEN’s unpaid general manager and began the work that movements rarely celebrate: rewriting statutes, closing the Belgian registration, establishing a legal home in the United Kingdom, opening working bank accounts, and building the administrative structure needed to accept grants. He later described his contribution with blunt accuracy: "Rescuing BIEN from extinction and leaving it in robust administrative and financial health."
The rescue held. BIEN’s new Charitable Incorporated Organisation was registered in the United Kingdom on 8 February 2018. That legal fact would have sounded painfully mundane during the referendum summer of 2016. It turned out to be one of the decade’s defining achievements.
BIEN was about to face a problem that successful movements eventually meet. Obscurity had protected the idea from distortion. Popularity would not. Governments, charities, political campaigns, researchers, and technology companies were beginning to use the phrase "basic income" for policies that differed sharply in who received money, how often it arrived, whether it was conditional, and whether anyone could plan around it.
BIEN needed to survive long enough to explain the difference.
Figure. Fourth-decade milestones, 2016-2026: institutional repair, political breakthroughs, pandemic-era cash, regional expansion, ENRA, and the 25th BIEN Congress in Toronto.
Five words for a crowded decade
That argument came to a head at the 2016 BIEN Congress in Seoul.
Group photo of participants at the 16th BIEN Congress in Seoul, July 2016. Source: BIEN Congress archive, via Ritsumeikan University.
For thirty years, BIEN had described basic income as an income granted to all, individually, without a means test or work requirement. The wording carried the moral core. It still left practical questions. Was a one-time cheque a basic income? What about food vouchers? A household payment? A temporary trial? Could a means-tested transfer qualify if there was no work condition?
A workshop of roughly thirty people tried to reconcile competing proposals. The discussion continued through breaks, into the evening, and the following morning. Louise Haagh warned against losing BIEN’s character as a "very broad church of plural debate". Some participants wanted adequacy inside the definition so governments could not relabel a token payment as basic income. Others feared that an adequacy test would exclude partial basic incomes that could become steps toward something larger.
Figure. The Seoul Definition (2016): BIEN’s five-part test for basic income (periodic, cash, individual, universal, and unconditional) and the adjacent policies those criteria exclude.
The same meeting adopted a separate political resolution. A majority supported an income stable in size and frequency, high enough alongside social services to help eliminate material poverty and enable participation. It also opposed replacing services or entitlements when the result would make vulnerable people worse off. The division of labor was useful. The definition established what the policy was. The resolution stated what most members wanted a good version of it to achieve.
Seoul also showed how far the network had spread. The General Assembly recognized six new affiliates, including networks in India, New Zealand, Quebec, Scotland, China, and Taiwan. A motion requiring annual congresses failed, but Lisbon was approved for 2017 and Tampere for 2018. An annual rhythm took hold anyway.
The five-part definition became one of BIEN’s most valuable pieces of infrastructure. The philosophical argument continued, but the tests made it easier to conduct honestly. A payment could be generous, humane, and worth studying while still failing one or more of the tests. That distinction mattered more with every new pilot and every new headline.
BIEN’s five-part definition distinguishes a basic income from adjacent cash policies. The comparison uses program rules in place during the periods discussed in this article.
What the pilots actually showed
On 1 January 2017, two thousand unemployed people in Finland began receiving EUR 560 a month. They did not have to prove that they were looking for work, and the payment continued if they found a job. The experiment was randomized and administered nationwide, but participants came from a defined group of unemployment-benefit recipients. It did not test a universal income across Finnish society.
For Sini Marttinen, selection felt like "winning the lottery." "You lose the bureaucracy, the reporting," she told The Guardian. She later opened a restaurant with two friends. Journalist Tuomas Muraja used the period to write and publish books. These stories gave the experiment a human scale before the final tables arrived.
The employment result was modest. The groups barely differed in the first year. In the second, recipients worked about six additional days, but Finland introduced an activation regime that changed conditions for the control group and made the second-year employment result difficult to attribute. Recipients reported greater life satisfaction, less mental strain, and more economic security. Later register research added a harder measure: the experiment reduced psychotropic drug use by 8 to 11 percent, while finding no significant effects on other measured health outcomes.
Finland became a lesson in the distance between the experiment the public imagined and the one the government designed. It mainly tested whether removing benefit withdrawal and job-search conditions would improve employment among unemployed people. It offered little guidance on what a permanent universal income, financed through the tax system and paid across the whole population, would do.
Ontario exposed another limit. A pilot can be rigorous on paper and still collapse under ordinary politics.
Launched in 2017, the Ontario Basic Income Pilot paid about four thousand low-income adults in Hamilton, Brantford, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay. The benefit was income-tested and adjusted for couples, which placed it outside BIEN’s definition. Participants cared more about what changed in their daily lives. Interviews later captured the feeling in one sentence: "I was trusted for once". People described stable housing, better food, transportation, glasses they were willing to wear, and enough room to consider school or a different job.
A new provincial government cancelled the three-year pilot early and wound down payments by March 2019. Participants had signed leases, enrolled in courses, and reorganized work around the government’s promise. The cancellation did more than destroy a research design. It shifted the cost of political reversal onto people who had been asked to trust the state.
Stockton, California, offered a smaller study with a different causal story. Beginning in February 2019, the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration gave 125 randomly selected residents $500 a month for 24 months. After one year, full-time employment among recipients rose from 28 to 40 percent, compared with 32 to 37 percent in the control group. The project linked that movement to the practical capacity to train, interview, or accept a temporary loss of earnings. One participant explained that the money made it possible to leave a job and take the risk required to pursue an internship.
Anxiety and depression measures improved. Most tracked debit-card spending went to food, household goods, utilities, and transportation. Less than one percent of tracked purchases went to alcohol or tobacco, although cash withdrawals and transfers meant the card data could not describe every dollar a household spent.
Figure. The pilot becomes a genre: major fourth-decade basic-income and guaranteed-income experiments, their headline findings, and the limits of what each design can establish.
Kenya’s GiveDirectly study pushed hardest on time. About 23,000 people across the treatment villages entered arms that included twelve years of monthly payments, two years of monthly payments, or a large lump sum. The long-term group was promised $22.50 a month for twelve years. After the first two years, the long-term and short-term monthly groups had received similar amounts. The remaining ten-year promise allowed researchers to ask whether a credible future changed present behavior.
It did. The long-term commitment encouraged more saving and investment than the two-year stream. The lump sum produced the largest immediate gains on many economic measures, including enterprise creation, while monthly payments performed better on some measures of food variety and depression. The study found no reduction in total labor supply. Its sharper lesson concerned design. Duration and payment cadence change behavior. A two-year experiment may miss what permanence does, while a lump sum can outperform a short monthly stream when people need capital rather than cash flow.
The largest U.S. randomized study brought another layer of restraint. OpenResearch enrolled three thousand low-income adults in Texas and Illinois. One thousand received $1,000 a month for three years, while two thousand received $50. Recipients increased spending, especially on housing, food, and transportation. They also had more ability to support relatives and more freedom to search for work that fit their goals.
Average work fell modestly, by roughly one to two hours a week depending on the specification, and employment was slightly lower. Improvements in stress and food security appeared early and then faded. Researchers found no durable population-level improvement in physical health. For Belle, a participant with disabilities facing unstable housing, the transfer still had an immediate meaning: "It was just a lifeline".
Taken together, the studies complicated both sides’ favorite story. Income security repeatedly reduced scarcity and administrative pressure. Employment effects ranged from small positives to modest reductions. Mental-health effects were stronger in some settings and temporary in others. The findings depended on who was included, the amount, the payment schedule, the institutions surrounding the transfer, and what happened when the study ended.
A pilot can generate evidence without reproducing the political guarantee, tax system, universality, or permanence of a national basic income.
The projects differed sharply in scale, duration, eligibility, and political status. Participant counts are approximate and the vertical axis is logarithmic so small and large studies can appear together.
The lunch that put basic income on presidential television
Research was only one route into public life. Another began over lunch.
In 2017, Scott Santens met Andrew Yang at Cochon Butcher in New Orleans. Yang told him he was considering a presidential campaign. He had asked what someone with his background could do to move the basic-income movement furthest, and concluded that a presidential run could force the country to hear the idea.
Santens set a benchmark that felt audacious at the time. "If he could make it to just one national televised debate," Santens recalled telling him, and ensure basic income came up, "that such an event would be a huge win for the movement."
Yang’s Freedom Dividend, $1,000 a month for every American adult, gave the campaign a recognizable center. The "Yang Gang" carried it through podcasts, memes, town halls, and rallies. At the 2019 Basic Income March in New York, Santens remembers that most attendees had entered through the campaign. A policy associated with academic workshops became a political identity people wore on hats and printed on signs.
The campaign arrived during a publishing wave. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy developed the case around real freedom. Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists made the idea accessible to a mass audience. Annie Lowrey’s Give People Money approached it through reporting on poverty, technology, and the welfare state. The books disagreed on design and strategy. Together they made basic income legible to readers far outside BIEN.
Mainstream attention brought distortion with it. Automation forecasts became campaign certainty. "UBI" turned into a label for tax credits, stimulus cheques, local guaranteed-income pilots, and cryptocurrency projects. Arguments about replacing the welfare state were often attached to the whole idea even though basic-income advocates disagreed fiercely among themselves.
Miriam Laker encountered BIEN during this louder period and noticed a quieter habit. She was struck by "how the BIEN leaders listen with open minds to other opinions" while continuing to advocate among naysayers. That culture mattered. A network built as a broad church now had to welcome disagreement while insisting that words retain meaning.
Figure. Three BIEN contributors remember the fourth decade from inside it.
Malcolm Torry, Scott Santens, and Miriam Laker described survival, mainstream attention, and the habits needed to keep a wide movement in conversation.
A crisis reveals the value of systems already built
The crisis made the moral intuition behind basic income easy to grasp. When an external shock destroys earnings, people still need food, rent, medicine, and the ability to stay home. It also revealed the cost of proving need in real time. Countries with working identification systems, registries, and payment rails moved faster. Others asked newly unemployed people to navigate overwhelmed offices and broken portals.
Most pandemic transfers still failed BIEN’s five-part test. They were one-off rather than periodic, household-based rather than individual, means-tested rather than universal, or tied to previous earnings. Some were broad enough to feel universal, but remained emergency measures. Calling every pandemic cheque a basic income made the movement sound more victorious than it was and blurred the reasons some programs reached people quickly while others did not.
Marica, Brazil, showed what changed when an income system already existed.
By late 2019, the municipality’s Citizens’ Basic Income paid 130 mumbucas per person each month to about 42,500 low-income residents. One mumbuca was pegged to one Brazilian real and circulated through a local digital-currency network. The program used the federal social registry and an income threshold, so it was not universal under BIEN’s definition. Benefits were calculated per person but usually delivered through family cards.
When COVID-19 arrived, Marica already had recipients, records, and a payment channel. In April 2020, it raised the transfer from 130 to 300 mumbucas, an increase of about 130 percent. Researchers describe this as a "dial up, dial down" model: keep a permanent floor in place, then raise it rapidly when a crisis hits.
For massage therapist Luciana de Souza Nunes, the local currency was concrete. "I use the mumbuca mainly at the supermarket and at the pharmacy, to buy the basics," she told El Pais. Her work income could cover other bills. Because the currency circulated among local merchants, the transfer also supported shops while residents stayed home.
In 2025, BIEN held its 24th Congress in Marica and neighboring Niteroi under the theme "Basic Income & Solidarity Economy." A municipal program once treated as peripheral had become a place where the global network could study the interaction among income, local currency, public services, oil revenue, and regional development.
Eduardo Suplicy at the 24th BIEN Congress in Brazil, August 2025. Source: BIEN’s Congress photo gallery.
The pandemic’s strongest lesson was institutional. A standing, trusted, technically functional income floor can be increased quickly when disaster arrives. Permanence is a form of preparedness.
BIEN learns how to survive attention
BIEN’s own development followed the same logic. Infrastructure built before a crisis determines what an organization can do when attention surges.
The 2018 UK registration gave BIEN a stable legal entity that could hold funds, sign agreements, and survive changes in volunteer leadership. The achievement belonged to Torry’s rescue work, but the culture around the handoff also mattered. At the 2019 Congress in Hyderabad, Sarath Davala tried to persuade Torry to stand for chair. Torry spent the meeting persuading Davala instead. "I won," Torry recalled. Davala later stood for chair and succeeded Louise Haagh in 2020. Torry’s conclusion was simple: "He has been brilliant."
A gathering from Karl Widerquist’s submitted BIEN photo archive. Photo submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project.
In 2022, BIEN secured a three-year grant from the Mustardseed Trust to strengthen its international presence and regional Hubs. For the first time in its thirty-six-year history, BIEN launched a formal fundraising appeal. The grant supported paid regional work, but much of it required matching funds. Professionalization therefore created a second task: building a donor base broad enough that one grant would not become a new form of fragility.
BIEN’s Hubs page, checked on 7 August 2026, reports activity across three regions, 99 countries, 70 partner organizations, and ten regional events. The figures describe regional reach rather than ninety-nine mature national affiliates. They still reveal a different organizational ambition. "Earth" could no longer mean a European-centered network that occasionally welcomed visitors. Regional leadership had to influence the agenda and bring forms of insecurity into the conversation that wealthy-country debates often miss.
Professionalization carries risks. Paid staff can concentrate authority. Grant cycles can reshape priorities. A more visible organization can become cautious or dependent on a few people. Volunteer romanticism is a poor answer. BIEN’s condition in 2016 showed where informal systems can end. The practical answer is better institutional design: distributed authority, published evidence, preserved records, recurring leadership handoffs, and finances strong enough to survive disagreement.
The decade linked organizational repair, public attention, emergency cash, regional expansion, and the first long-term sovereign program explicitly designed as a basic income.
The Marshall Islands crosses the line from pilot to policy
One of the decade’s most interesting basic income policy stories began far from the countries that had dominated the debate.
The Republic of the Marshall Islands executed its first ENRA distributions on 26 November 2025. More than 33,000 citizens registered for the first round, the largest national outreach effort in the country’s history across twenty-four atoll communities. Payments reached people through direct deposit, paper cheques, and a small pilot of the Lomalo digital wallet designed for communities with limited banking infrastructure.
Figure. Marshall Islands ENRA, 2025-2026: the move from pilot to permanent national policy, including enrollment, delivery systems, residence rules, inflation pressure, and budget durability.
The initial payment was about US$200 per person, or roughly US$800 a year. For Iohaan Anjolok, a paralegal worker in Majuro living with his wife and two children, four individual entitlements became meaningful household cash flow. "We save half and use the other half on expenses," he told ABC. He called the payment a morale boost in a country where many workers earn less than US$200 a week.
ENRA is funded from the Compact Trust Fund created through the Marshall Islands’ relationship with the United States. The government’s white paper reported more than US$1.3 billion in trust-fund assets in mid-2025, with further contributions committed through 2027. That funding is rooted in a difficult history. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. Compact finance, military access, climate vulnerability, high food costs, and outward migration all sit behind the government’s language of shared prosperity.
The program is already showing what happens when a permanent entitlement meets a fixed appropriation. Enrollment rose above 41,000 and the March 2026 payment fell to about US$160 because the annual allocation had to be shared among more eligible people. Administrators also delayed the distribution while checking whether registrants still met the residence rule and reviewing exemptions for students, medical referrals, and diplomatic staff.
The May 2026 payment was supplemented to about US$200 during an energy-price emergency, and the late-August payment is scheduled to receive the same supplement. The government proposed a larger appropriation for fiscal year 2027 to keep the payment near that level. In June 2026, the World Bank reported that fuel costs had tripled and inflation was projected at 8.6 percent, with families facing higher prices for electricity, food, and transport. A fixed nominal benefit had entered a moving economy.
Those complications are the policy. Universality requires a rule about who belongs. Regularity requires a budget that survives enrollment changes and market returns. Digital access requires connectivity, merchants, literacy, and fallback channels. Adequacy has to be defended against inflation. A permanent program creates obligations that a pilot can postpone.
ENRA will not solve housing shortages, climate risk, imported food costs, health needs, or the nuclear legacy. Its annual value remains modest. It may still become the clearest demonstration yet of what changes when basic income stops being an experiment and becomes a line in a sovereign budget.
The argument BIEN is here to protect
The fourth decade replaced the hope of a single verdict with better questions and more honest boundaries.
Finland showed that removing conditions and increasing income can improve mental health without producing a dramatic employment surge. Ontario showed that participants bear the risk when a government revokes a promise. Stockton showed how a small cushion can turn volatility into room for action. Kenya showed that the promise of duration changes behavior before future payments arrive. OpenResearch showed that a large transfer can expand choice while leaving many health outcomes unchanged. Marica showed how a standing payment system can become emergency infrastructure. The Marshall Islands is beginning to show what universality, residence, payment systems, inflation, and fiscal durability mean once they are no longer hypothetical.
Across those cases, BIEN’s role is to preserve distinctions: cash and vouchers, individual and household, universal and targeted, unconditional and work-tested, experiment and entitlement, emergency relief and a durable floor. These differences can sound pedantic until a government cancels a pilot, excludes someone through an income test, changes the payment schedule, or substitutes one cheque for security.
The human evidence is less abstract. People used cash for groceries, rent, transport, medicine, children, debt, training, and time to look for something better. The transfer widened the range of decisions they could make, including the power to refuse a bad option.
Santens believes the next decade will be decided by whether permanent policies arrive before artificial intelligence and automation deepen insecurity. Torry’s warning points to the same future from another direction: BIEN must "maintain the integrity of the definition of Basic Income" while the idea spreads.
Forty years after a group of "lonely fighters" built a home for the idea, BIEN now operates without the protection of obscurity. It has to remain broad without becoming meaningless, professional without becoming closed, global without reproducing old centers of power, and hopeful without treating mixed evidence as disloyalty.
BIEN is scheduled to gather in Toronto from 19 to 22 August 2026 for its 25th Congress, with the main Congress program at Toronto Metropolitan University from 20 to 22 August, focused on basic income and the polycrisis. The world facing that congress is rich in cash-transfer experiments. Durable institutions remain scarce.
The decade began with a closed bank account. It ends with a sovereign country placing a recurring payment inside its national machinery. Between those points lies the real history of 2016-2026: basic income became impossible to ignore, and BIEN had to become capable of carrying the weight of being heard.
Acknowledgment
This article draws on responses submitted to BIEN’s 40th Anniversary Oral History Project by Malcolm Torry, Scott Santens, Miriam Laker, and Karl Widerquist, alongside official records, journalism, books, and academic research.
Core sources
These sources anchor the central historical, research, and policy claims in this retrospective.
Gogolook’s JUJI and UBI Taiwan will give three people NT$10,000 a month for a year.
At the launch of the Life Rewrite Project, I asked the audience what real freedom means. Is true freedom possible if you cannot afford basic necessities? This project from UBI Taiwan and JUJI, a Taiwanese loan app, is going to provide a ‘basic income’ to three recipients for a year to see if unconditional cash improves their freedom to build a better life.
For Taiwan’s youngest generation entering the workforce, they often do not feel they have the freedom to pursue their passions or start a family because of stagnating wages. This feeling may be only compounded by recent advances in automation.
Basic income advocates ask: What could a person do for himself, his family and Taiwan if he did not have to keep fearing tomorrow?
Henry Lee, UBI Taiwan’s head of policy and public relations, gave the same question a number: What would change if NT$10,000 arrived every month for the next 12 months? He said the money might cover tutoring, emergency medical costs, or simply buy back time from nonstop delivery work. JUJI’s internal data, he added, sometimes shows people seeking NT$5,000 at three in the morning, and some applying twice in one month. Those examples are revealing: a need for NT$5,000 at 3 a.m. is a different policy problem from a planned consumer purchase.
The public terms are simple. Three participants will receive NT$10,000 a month for one year, without a work requirement, spending restriction or repayment obligation. UBI Taiwan will follow their experiences over the year and the partners plan an impact report. The direct cash totals NT$360,000. The partners call it Taiwan’s first corporate-sponsored basic-income trial.
The project reaches three people and leaves universality outside the design. Its setup is still revealing: a company whose financial product helps people borrow through emergencies is funding income that never becomes debt.
The contradiction inside the project
For readers outside Taiwan, the organizations need some context. Gogolook is a publicly listed Taipei technology company best known for Whoscall, its caller-identification and anti-scam service. It has expanded from fraud prevention into financial technology. JUJI is its emergency-financing product for people who may lack the documents, income pattern or credit history expected by conventional banks. At the project launch, JUJI placed the product in the context of people caught between scam risks and urgent funding needs.
UBI Taiwan grew out of the first Asia-Pacific basic-income conference I organized at National Chengchi University. Since then, it has produced policy proposals for national legislators, organized public marches, and run a single-parent cash pilot. The organization approaches basic income less as a finished law waiting to be copied than as an institutional direction: cash, regularity, individual control and fewer gates between a person and economic security.
JUJI says it has more than 30,000 monthly active users and has provided more than NT$1 billion in emergency financing over three years. Users under 35 account for nearly 70 percent. The company classifies 55 percent as financially vulnerable, a category that includes people without credit cards, with income below NT$10,000 a month, or without stable earnings. Its most striking number is a 95 percent re-application rate.
That rate can be read two ways. From a product perspective, repeat use can mean trust, retention and access to better terms; Gogolook says nearly 60 percent of returning vulnerable users received improved conditions. From a social-policy perspective, the same number describes recurring insecurity. An emergency that returns every few months may not be an emergency. It may be the ordinary gap between what life costs and what income can reliably cover. Taiwanese technology outlet INSIDE made the paradox clear: a loan platform reaching undercredited users is funding a program that could make some people less reliant on emergency borrowing.
Johnson Ke, head of Gogolook’s fintech business, told reporters that tighter credit supply had not made the need disappear; JUJI’s organic traffic rose roughly 10 to 20 percent. The more durable point is that regulation can change how formal credit is supplied without removing the rent, repair or medical bill that created the demand.
A fair, transparent loan can keep a broken scooter, a delayed paycheck or a medical bill from destroying a month. It can be far safer than an illegal lender or a scam. But credit solves a timing problem by moving future income into the present. It cannot make inadequate income adequate. When borrowing repeats, the bridge is spanning the same hole again and again.
Jiakuan Su, chair of UBI Taiwan, described financial inclusion and basic income as different routes toward the same objective: keeping a temporary shortfall from becoming a vicious cycle. “The choices money creates are not only material,” he said. “They affect relationships and a person’s inner life as well.” The ability to pay without asking a parent, partner or friend is a form of autonomy that household statistics often miss.
Company-reported JUJI user profile and official wage benchmarks. “Financially vulnerable” is JUJI’s internal category; the public announcement does not give a time window for the 95 percent re-application rate.
A rich economy can still produce poor margins
The project is arriving at a strange moment in Taiwan. The economy grew 8.76 percent in 2025, according to Taiwan’s statistics agency. That was Taiwan’s fastest expansion in 15 years. It is also possible for a country to grow quickly while many households remain one repair away from debt.
The Chinese-language BIEN report on the partnership describes the divide more directly: the gap created by a “K-shaped economy” is becoming a hard-to-articulate pressure for younger people and nonstandard workers, while forms of “invisible poverty” continue to fall through the traditional welfare system. A person can be employed, active in the economy and still have too little margin to absorb a deposit, repair or medical bill. That is the territory between poverty policy and consumer credit where JUJI operates.
The Ministry of Labor reports that recent graduates entering full-time work in 2025 earned an average of NT$39,000 a month and a median of NT$36,000; 17.2 percent started at the minimum wage then in force. The 2026 minimum wage is NT$29,500. The Life Rewrite payment is roughly one-third of that floor. It is large enough to alter a tight budget and too small to substitute for a wage. That distinction matters. It is true that NT$10,000 will not make a person financially secure alone. It asks whether a modest floor changes the decisions available before a crisis becomes irreversible.
In Global Views Monthly, UBI Taiwan described Taiwan’s squeeze through three linked pressures: wages, prices and housing. This points to the distribution problem beneath the growth story. Taiwan’s technology and export sectors can generate extraordinary value while a worker outside those sectors experiences the boom mainly through higher asset prices and a more expensive city.
A second UBI Taiwan essay used the idea of a scarcity tunnel. When money and time are short, attention narrows to rent, bills and the next meal. That narrowing reflects constraint rather than moral failure. A young worker without savings, assets or family support also lacks a margin for error. Taking the first available job, delaying training or staying in a harmful workplace may be rational today and expensive over a lifetime.
The essay’s sharpest phrase was that young people can end up “selling their future too cheaply.” A small cash floor can widen the decision window: two extra weeks to find a better job, enough money for a rental deposit, or a repair paid without rolling debt into the next month can change which opportunities are feasible.
For me, basic income works as an investment in time to learn, the capacity to care, and the ability to try a new job or project. Like education, its return is uncertain. Its practical value is giving people enough margin to survive one failure without losing everything.
Henry Lee presents the Life Rewrite Project at the launch event.
At the project launch, I repeated my argument that basic income is an investment in Taiwan’s most valuable asset: its people.
This is why I resist making AI the only case for basic income. AI does add urgency. Entry-level tasks are where young workers build judgment, contacts and a record of competence, and some of those tasks are becoming easier to automate. But basic income should not depend on predicting a job apocalypse. Its strongest argument is that financial security gives people more room to recover, study, and breathe. Technology changes the timeline. It does not create the underlying principle.
Lee has described Taiwan’s semiconductor position as being born on “the oil field of the next generation.” The metaphor contains both pride and warning. A country can sit above an oil field while most citizens own none of it. Taiwan’s distribution question is not only how to protect people from technological disruption, but whether households should hold a direct claim on the productivity built around semiconductors, compute and public investment.
Taiwan has also made direct cash politically ordinary. The government distributed broad NT$6,000 payments in 2023 and NT$10,000 payments in 2025. Neither was basic income because neither was periodic. But they showed that the state can send cash widely, simply and without asking every recipient to prove hardship first. The debate has moved from whether universal cash is imaginable to when it is justified, how often it should recur and whether it should become an institution rather than an event.
What one mother taught us about time
UBI Taiwan’s earlier single-parent pilot is the closest local precedent. Beginning in 2023, a mother raising a son received NT$10,000 a month. During the project she moved, changed jobs and was diagnosed with cancer. The payment later continued at a lower level into a second year. She told Global Views that the most direct effect was “a great sense of security.”
Cash left the cancer, Taiwan’s labor market and the family’s issues untouched. Its effect was narrower: each new shock was less likely to become a second crisis. A predictable transfer meant the household did not have to renegotiate its right to support every month the participant’s job, health or income changed.
At the JUJI launch, I recalled her saying that the payment let her finally breathe. She did not say she had become rich. She described having enough space to care for her child, face illness and think about the next job. That is the form of freedom I mean when I talk about basic income. Freedom is not an inspirational slogan. It is the ability to leave a job that harms you, refuse an unreasonable high-interest loan, or fail once without losing everything.
The single-parent pilot also taught us something uncomfortable about storytelling. I argued at the time that Taiwan did not lack international data; it lacked a local life people could recognize. The documentary film director put the problem more carefully: real life cannot be scripted, and the participant’s illness was a fact, not a convenient plot turn. A human narrative can make an abstract policy legible. It can also turn a recipient into raw material for advocacy.
The lesson is to keep the person more important than the story.
What three lives can reveal – and what they cannot prove
BIEN defines basic income through five characteristics: periodic, cash, individual, universal and unconditional. This pilot uses four; universality remains outside the design. Selection itself changes who applies, how entitlement feels and what social meaning the payment carries. The accurate label is a guaranteed-income pilot inspired by basic income.
The sample size sets another boundary. Three cases cannot produce a national effect size or tell Taiwan what a full UBI would cost. They can reveal mechanisms. The strongest research design is a transparent longitudinal case study: establish a baseline, follow decisions and shocks during the payment year, then continue after the final transfer to study the cliff when predictability ends.
Research-scope graphic: the payment schedule and longitudinal design can document individual trajectories and plausible mechanisms. Population effects, universality and fiscal cost remain outside this study’s reach.
The most useful measures extend beyond total spending. The project should track repeat borrowing, arrears, savings, job changes, work hours, care responsibilities, food and housing security, health interruptions, stress, sleep, family conflict and the ability to refuse unsafe or exploitative work. It should also ask what the money did not change. A cash floor can create room without overcoming a housing market, a disability, a care burden or a weak job match.
One of the most useful recent large cash studies offers a warning against simple redemption stories. OpenResearch followed 3,000 people in the United States for three years; 1,000 received US$1,000 a month and 2,000 received US$50. Recipients were more likely to report budgeting and planning for large expenses, and in the final year they were 14 percent more likely to report pursuing education or job training. The January 2026 employment-paper revision estimates that recipients worked one to two fewer hours a week and were 4.1 percentage points less likely to participate in the labor market. The study found greater use of some medical care, with no measurable improvement in physical health. Spending rose mainly on housing, food and transportation, while the net-worth effect was close to zero.
Those findings show why serious evidence rarely fits a verdict: gains, trade-offs and limits appear in the same dataset. OpenResearch’s own conclusion is the right one for Taiwan to keep in view. Cash is an important part of the puzzle; its effects can be constrained when health care, child care, housing and decent work remain out of reach.
The Life Rewrite Project should therefore tell three true human stories that may not make a perfect redemption arc. Participants may use the money to stabilize rather than transform their lives. They may stay in debt, work less, work more, or make choices the sponsor would not make. Unconditionality means the recipient, not the funder, decides what the urgent problem is.
The real ESG test is whether JUJI can learn something inconvenient
Henry Lee has argued that the partnership could make basic-income experiments part of the social-impact side of corporate ESG and turn the idea into a form of “good business.” I share the ambition. I also think it sets a harder test than ordinary sponsorship.
The strongest version of this partnership is that JUJI is examining whether part of the value created by serving financial insecurity can be used to reduce that insecurity. This is an admirable goal of the company.
The partnership also combines two kinds of visibility. JUJI encounters financial stress when someone asks for emergency help; UBI Taiwan follows what changes after predictable cash enters the picture. That creates a chance to examine the sequence of a crisis. From this, we can better understand what happens first, which choices disappear, and whether the next emergency arrives on the same terms.
Direct cash has one advantage over much corporate social-impact activity: the input is auditable. A participant either received NT$10,000 on schedule or did not. What makes this project especially interesting is that a listed company’s core product, customer base and business logic are being placed in direct conversation with a basic-income organization.
The Chinese-language BIEN report about the project frames the financing question bluntly: how can a basic-income experiment be run without relying on donations? It describes the ambition as a “virtuous cycle in which social good and business coexist,” and asks whether companies can return part of the gains from technological and commercial growth to society, creating room for people under pressure to choose again.
One of its strongest lines concerns what financial systems see: “Change can begin when a person is no longer just a number rejected by a risk model and once again has the chance to choose the course of their own life.” That idea gives the partnership moral force and exposes its governance risk. A company close to emergency borrowing can recognize patterns that a distant donor may miss. The same proximity gives it unusual power over data, selection and the stories told afterward.
Private funding has already carried cash experiments into public debate. UBI4ALL says its global raffles are entirely crowdfunded. Stockton’s SEED demonstration operated on a fully philanthropic US$3 million budget and helped launch Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. Those models show how private money can produce evidence, administrative experience and new political constituencies before government is ready.
They also show why a pilot needs an exit into policy. The Economic Security Project now argues that time-limited demonstrations should feed permanent public systems. Corporate funding adds another test: social success may conflict with the sponsor’s short-term business metrics. If predictable cash lowers emergency borrowing, the movement should count that as useful evidence, even when the result is commercially inconvenient.
The most valuable export from Taiwan may be a reusable governance model. The sponsor funds the transfers; an independent body controls consent, analysis and publication; participants control publicity; and the methods are available for others to test. The UBI Piloters Network was created because findings and failures have too often remained local. Thus, the institutional discoveries from UBI Taiwan’s pilot program give it the potential to provide infrastructure for the broader UBI movement.
From a pilot to an institution
UBI Taiwan’s funding history shows why the source of money matters. A student talent night with Ascent Academy raised thousands of U.S. dollars toward reviving UBI Taiwan’s single-parent program. JUJI adds a different source: a corporation’s operating budget. Neither model creates a right, but both build the administrative experience and public discussion that policy needs before a national system exists.
What to watch is whether the partnership can create a durable model that persists beyond the first cohort.
Taiwan’s recent universal cash programs also left behind payment infrastructure. After the 2025 NT$10,000 distribution, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said it would convert the system into a “basic common platform for government disbursement” for future subsidies, relief and stimulus payments. That administrative inheritance matters: each large cash program makes the next one easier to deliver.
Over the longer term, the bigger question is whether these campaigns affect the policy discussion. A national basic income cannot depend on whether a company has a profitable year, a sympathetic executive or an ESG campaign. Public policy must still decide who receives money, how much, from which taxes or shared assets, and under what legal guarantee.
Corporate pilots are useful because they create operational knowledge and make better institutions easier to imagine. Taiwan’s basic-income politics are already forming through institutions that solve different problems: one-off universal cash, proposed child payments, youth security, and proposals to give citizens a share of public or technology-created wealth. None is a full UBI. Together they move the argument from imported theory toward Taiwanese design.
South Korea offers the clearest regional benchmark. Lee Jae-myung entered the presidency in 2025 after years of supporting youth dividends and a broader “Basic Society.” In 2026, the national government launched a rural pilot for population-decline counties: verified residents receive KRW150,000 each month through 2027 in local gift certificates. The program began in 10 counties. Seven additional counties were selected in June, with payments in those newly selected counties scheduled to begin in August.
The scale and degree of public ownership far exceed Taiwan’s three-person project. The Korean design also restricts where the money can be spent, which is why BIEN says it falls outside its definition of basic income. The ministry has already reported a 4.7 percent population increase and a 13.7 percent rise in new participating merchants in the original counties. Those early administrative movements may reflect migration, registration or other factors and should not be treated as impact estimates.
The two countries are testing different edges of the idea. Korea approaches universality inside selected territories while limiting the payment to local vouchers. Taiwan provides unrestricted cash to selected individuals. Korea has public scale with less freedom over the money; Taiwan has cash freedom with almost no scale.
On momentum, Korea is further ahead. It has a president associated with basic income, a history of youth dividends and a national ministry running a multi-county program. Taiwan’s momentum is more dispersed across one-off universal cash, child-payment proposals, AI and public-wealth debates, civil-society pilots and this corporate partnership. That diversity can bring more sectors into the argument. It can also fragment the idea into vouchers, accounts, charity and branding unless advocates keep the destination clear: a regular individual cash claim backed by public institutions.
This is how I expect basic income to arrive, if it arrives: as a sequence of policies, pilots and funding systems that make economic security normal. The work of advocates is to keep those systems aligned with the principles that matter – cash people can use now, regularity, individual control, universality as the destination, and trust rather than repeated proof of desperation.
The project is called Life Rewrite. Its most credible result may look like a scooter repair that does not become high-interest debt, a parent who can wait two weeks for a better job, or one month in which an emergency remains an event instead of becoming a system.
The payments will end after 12 months. The more important question is whether the logic behind them survives.
Disclosure: I co-founded UBI Taiwan and spoke at the launch of the Life Rewrite Project. Project statistics are company-reported unless otherwise stated. Quotations translated from the launch speeches and panel discussion were lightly edited for readable English. The analysis, limitations and recommendations in this article are my own.
Core sources
Gogolook newsroom: project terms and company-reported JUJI statistics.
INSIDE: local fintech and regulatory context; dual interpretation of repeat borrowing.
Translation note: English remarks attributed to Tyler Prochazka, Henry Lee, Johnson Ke and Jiakuan Su are editorial translations of Chinese speeches and panel discussion supplied by the commissioning editor. Filler was removed and adjacent sentences were occasionally combined without changing the substance.
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With the theme, ‘From the COVID-19 Disaster to New Great Transition, Basic Income!’ the 3rd annual Basic Income International Conference was held in Gyeonggi Provence, South Korea, 28-29 April 2021. Hosted by the Gyeonggi Provincial Government, and organised by Gyeonggi Research Institute (GRI), Gyeonggi-do Market Revitalization Agency (GMRA), KINTEX, and the Basic Income Korean Network (BIKN), it featured panel talks and discussion by many researchers from BIEN, including Chair Sarath Davala, Hyosang Ahn, Philippe Van Parijs, Guy Standing, Annie Miller, Troy Henderson, Louise Haagh, Almaz Zelleke, Julio Linares, Roberto Merrill among others. Economist Joseph Stiglitz gave a keynote speech on the second day.
words like “green city” or “smart city” in popular usage. Wise Cities, as defined by CIDOB and others in the Wise Cities think tank network, are characterized by a joint focus on research and people, using new technologies to improve lives, and creating useful and trusting partnerships between citizens, government, academia, and the private sector.
The 2017 report by Coll opens with a discussion of the future of global economies; it highlights mechanization of labour, potential increases in unemployment, and financial inequality. It next points to cities as centres of both population and economic innovation and experimentation. A Wise City, the paper states, will be a hub of innovation that uses economic predistribution—where assets are equally distributed prior to government taxation and redistribution—to maximize quality of life for its citizens.
Predistribution in Europe: Pilot Projects
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one example of a predistribution policy. After touching on UBI’s history and current popularity, Coll summarizes European projects in Finland, Utrecht, and Barcelona in order to highlight city-based predistribution experiments. Coll adds that while basic income is defined as unconditional cash payments, none of these pilots fit that definition: they all target participants who are currently, or were at some time, unemployed or low-income.
Finland’s project began in January 2017, and reduces the bureaucracy involved in social security services. It delivers an unconditional (in the sense of non-means-tested and non-work-tested after the program begins) income of 560 €/month for 2,000 randomly selected unemployed persons for two years. Eventual analysis will consist of a comparison with a larger control group of 175,000 people, and the pilot is a public initiative.
The city of Utrecht and Utrecht University designed an experiment which would also last two years, and would provide basic income of 980 €/month to participants already receiving social assistance. The evaluation would assess any change in job seeking, social activity, health and wellness, and an estimate of how much such a program would cost to implement in full. The author comments that the program was suspended by the Netherlands Ministry of Social Affairs, and the pilot is currently under negotiation.
Barcelona has begun an experiment with 1,000 adult participants in a particularly poor region of the city, who must have been social services recipients in the past. “B-Mincome” offers a graduated 400-500 €/month income depending on the household. After two years, the pilot will be assessed by examining labour market reintegration, including self-employment and education, as well as food security, health, wellbeing, social networks, and community participation. Because the income is household-based, and not paid equally to each individual, it is not a Basic Income, but the results could still provide useful evidence for the possible effects of a future Basic Income.
The Implications
Coll identifies several key takeaways from a comparison of these projects. None of the experiments assess the potential behavioural change in rich or middle class basic income recipients. In addition, multi-level governance may cause problems for basic income pilots, but these issues may be mitigated as more evidence assessing the effectiveness of UBI builds from city-driven programs. Coll also acknowledges that all of the experiments listed in his paper are from affluent regions.
In conclusion, the author argues that UBI is a necessary step to alleviate economic inequality. While cities are experimenting with the best ways to implement UBI, they are often not real UBI trials (as they are not universal), and they do not always take an individual-based approach; however, they are nevertheless useful components of the Wise City model.
The municipalities of Groningen, Wageningen, Tilburg, Deventer, and Ten Boer have received permission from the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment to proceed with proposed social assistance experiments.
Jetta Klijnsma, State Secretary of Social Affairs and Employment, signed the authorization of the five municipal experiments on July 3, 2017.
Groningen and Ten Boer will be carrying out their experiments in cooperation with one another.
In each of the experiments, which will run for two years, participants will be randomly selected from a pool of current social assistance beneficiaries (with participation voluntary for those selected), and assigned either to a control group or to one of several treatment groups.
Each experiment has at least three treatment groups, testing the following types of interventions: (1) removing reintegration requirements (e.g. job applications and training programs) on welfare benefits; (2) providing a more intensive form of reintegration service; (3) permitting participants to earn additional income on top of their welfare benefits. Subjects assigned to the third treatment groups will be permitted to retain 50% of additional earned income, up to a maximum of €199 per month, for the duration of the two-year experiment. In contrast, under current policy, welfare recipients are permitted to keep only 25% of additional income, and only for up to six months.
The Groningen / Ten Boer experiment includes a fourth treatment group, in which participants are permitted to choose to join any one of the three preceding groups.
Although international media have referred to these experiments as “basic income experiments”, the description is a bit of a misnomer. In all treatment groups, benefits remain means-tested and household-based, and participation is limited to current welfare recipients. Moreover, legal constraints create an effective demand on participants to seek work (on pain of removal from the experiment); this effective conditionality, unique to the Dutch experiments, is discussed below.
Sjir Hoeijmakers, an econometrician who consulted municipalities in their design of the experiments, prefers to speak of “experiments in the context of the Participation Act” (cf. this Basic Income News article), while others refer to “social assistance experiments”.
The experiments are expected to begin around October 1 of this year.
The Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment is currently reviewing applications from three additional municipalities who also wish to conduct experiments on social benefits: Amsterdam, Nijmegen, and Utrecht. Decisions on these proposals are expected later in the summer.
Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, Nijmegen was granted permission to carry out its experiment, which will commence on December 1. A full report on Nijmegen’s experiment will follow.
Background
The municipalities of Groningen, Tilburg, Wageningen, and Utrecht have been planning social assistance experiments since 2015, following the enactment of the Dutch Participation Act. Originally, these experiments were conceived as trials of unconditional basic income (or at least policy moving in this direction), although political pressures encouraged their proponents not to use the term “basic income” (which is popularly associated in the Netherlands with utopian thinking and celebration of laziness). Under the Participation Act, municipal officials are required to implement obligations and sanctions to encourage recipients of social assistance benefits to seek employment. For example, beneficiaries are generally expected to complete a set number of job applications per week, participate in training programs, and attend group meetings as conditions on receiving their benefits. Skepticism regarding the effectiveness of these conditions was a main motivation of the experiments.
In September 2016, Klijnsma authorized municipalities to perform experiments, up to two years in duration, testing the effects of altering the conditions of the nation’s social assistance benefits. This authorization was granted, however, only under strict terms of compliance with the nation’s Participation Act, which effectively prevent the municipalities from testing an unconditional basic income (despite interest in the idea from researchers and promoters of the experiments). For example, in the case in which an experiment treatment involves the removal of work reintegration requirements, the Ministry mandates that officials assess test subjects after six and twelve months to verify that they have made adequate effort to find employment; those who have not done so are subject to dismissal from the experiment.
The Ministry also capped the amount of earned income that participants are permitted to retain on top of their benefits, and required that any experiment including a treatment group with relaxed conditions on social assistance also include a treatment group with stricter conditions.
In the face of these constraints, researchers were forced to design experiments farther from “basic income experiments” than originally desired.
After announcement of a start date of May 1, 2017, Utrecht saw its proposed experiment put on-hold due to a failure to comply with the terms of the Participation Act. The city has since submitted a revised proposal to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, which is pending evaluation.
Another municipality, Terneuzen, proposed a small-scale study of basic income–providing unconditional cash payments of €933 to 20 test subjects–which was axed by Klijnsma earlier in the year. Terneuzen has not submitted a new proposal to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.
In a recent presentation to the Dutch branch of BIEN, Sjir Hoeijmakers stated that 45 municipalities are considering social assistance experiments.
