An important motivation of Mincome and the
negative income tax experiments in the U.S. was to determine the impact of a guaranteed income plan on incentives to work. University of Manitoba economists Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson analyzed labour supply or work disincentive issues in Mincome during the 1980s and published their results in a series of papers and a monograph. Their results showed a small impact on labour markets, with working hours dropping one percent for men, three percent for married women, and five percent for unmarried women. The largest impact appeared to be changes in family composition, not the experimental treatments, as preschool children increased the labour supply of husbands and reduced the labour supply of wives by roughly the same modest amount. This represents an important limitation to the knowledge of the impact of a guaranteed annual income as little is known about the long term effects on willingness to work. Economists Derek Hum and Wayne Simpson analyzed the labour supply responses and discovered that they were generally smaller than those estimated for similar experiments in the United States. David Prescott, Robert Swidinsky, and David Wilton examined the labour supply response of female heads of household, showing that the presence of younger children and another income-earning head (husband) prompted a reduction in work. In 2016, David Calnitsky published an analysis of a community survey of Dauphin completed in 1976 that probed for motivations for participation and perceptions of stigma associated with a GAI. He finds that an important benefit of basic annual incomes is the reduced stigma compared to conventional welfare. Economist
Evelyn L. Forget conducted a quasi-experimental analysis that compared health outcomes of Dauphin residents with other Manitoba residents. This research did not use the Mincome data directly, but under the assumption that if a high proportion of Dauphin residents participated in Mincome, one should be able to discern differences in social, economic, and health outcomes for that group, compared to the general population. Forget found that in the period that Mincome was administered, hospital visits dropped 8.5 percent, with fewer incidents of work-related injuries, and fewer emergency room visits from accidents and injuries. Forget also compared proportions of women with children and suggested lower lifetime fertility as a possible outcome by comparing birth rates of young mothers with those of a control group. The basic income is claimed to produce a range of health and social benefits, but it is important to underscore that none of the income maintenance experiments, including Mincome, produced direct evidence of a causal relation between income support and health outcomes. A focus of the Ontario Basic Income Pilot was to assess changes in health status among a range of other social outcomes, but the Ontario government cancelled this experiment in the summer of 2018. A review of the Mincome experiment appeared in the
Winnipeg Free Press on 23 January 2017. A comprehensive review of Mincome appears in
Canadian Public Policy. ==Accessing Mincome data and documentation==