Browsing by Author "Domingo Maunu, Laura"

Since the 2008 financial crisis there has been an increasing interest in basic income as an alternative to austerity policies. Basic income has become a substantial part of discussions about social policy and welfare state reforms in several countries. This has resulted in an increasing amount of basic income experiments planned and conducted in different parts of the world in recent years. (De Wispelaere, 2017) The B-Mincome pilot, which is an experiment conducted by the City Council of Barcelona in 10 neighborhoods of the Eix Besòs area in Barcelona from October 2017 to September 2019. It combines a minimum income benefit with four different active policies. This thesis examines what problems the B-Mincome project aims to solve and what are its goals and how it compares to theoretical models of basic income and participation income. The definition of basic income used in this thesis is based on Basic Income Earth Network’s widely accepted definition of basic income being a periodic cash payment paid unconditionally to all individuals without means-test or work requirement. Participation income is Anthony Atkinson’s (1996) elaboration of the basic income idea which includes conditionality in the form of social participation. The data of this study consists of seven semi-structured expert interviews of the civil servants and researchers behind the B-Mincome experiment as well as official documents of the project. The method used in this study is a theory-guided content analysis. The B-Mincome has research and experimentation goals (testing and comparing the impacts of different active policies combined with a minimum income benefit), social goals (improving the socio-economic situation and employability of participants, alleviating poverty and exclusion) and administrative and political goals (simplifying the benefit system and destigmatizing poverty). The biggest difference between B-Mincome and theoretical models of basic income and participation income is that B-Mincome is strictly means-tested. Regardless of the means-testing, B-Mincome the active policies can be considered as implementations of participation income as they depart from the traditional labour market targeted activities of workfare policies. The B-Mincome active policies of housing renovation, social economy and community participation are innovative in both the activities they include and their goals that go beyond finding paid employment. By describing the B-Mincome experiment and its goals, this thesis brings light to how policies inspired by basic income and participation income can be implemented. As more basic income and basic income inspired experiments are conducted and completed, it would be important to do synthesizing and comparative research on their goals, implementations and results.