04 Reinventing social welfare

Welfare state solutions may ensure that tech revolutions don't lead to mass unemployment and inequality, but what are the consequences?

More countries than ever before are showing interest in the idea of a basic income and several are preparing or already implementing local or national experiments; however, discussions about basic income programmes often tend to be ideological rather than empirical.

As part of this project, we will move beyond arguing from normative perspectives and aim to uncover what the intended and unintended consequences of social welfare solutions to technological unemployment are. This project fills the existing gap in our knowledge by providing new experimental evidence on the implementation of a variety of local and national field experiments on the introduction of participation (PI) and basic income (BI) programmes, and by studying the current empirical evidence on the social, motivational and micro-economic effects of various PI and BI programmes.

Tilburg University (lead), Maastricht University.