Mincome

Mincome, the "Manitoba Basic Annual Income Experiment", was a Canadian guaranteed annual income (GAI) social experiment conducted in Manitoba in the 1970s. The project was funded jointly by the Manitoba provincial government and the Canadian federal government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. It was launched with a news release on February 22, 1974, under the New Democratic Party Manitoba government of Edward Schreyer, and was closed down in 1979 under the Progressive Conservative Manitoba government of Sterling Lyon and the federal Progressive Conservative Party of Joe Clark. The purpose of the experiment was to assess the social impact of a guaranteed, unconditional annual income, UBI, including whether a program of this nature would create disincentives to work for the recipients and, if so, to what extent.

==Program structure== thumb|302x302px The experiment consisted of a randomized controlled trial in the City of Winnipeg and in rural Manitoba (the rural dispersed site). A so-called "saturation site" pilot project in the town of Dauphin, Manitoba was added in 1973. The Winnipeg and Dauphin sites randomly allocated lower-income households to one of seven treatment groups and a control group. The families in the treatment groups received an income guarantee or minimum cash benefit according to family size that was reduced by a specific amount (35, 50 or 75 cents) for every dollar they earned by working.