As the origin place of the COVID‐19 outbreak, East Asian welfare states have largely survived the immediate health threats out of the pandemic shock but have yet to deal with its dire social consequences. This paper offers an institutionalist account—in terms of the institutional resilience of the welfare state—to grasp the policy dynamics in East Asia. We select four cases under scrutiny: China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, to analyse the major trend of social policy responses in this region. With a systematic comparison of the policy responses, in particular reference to the unemployment protection and social assistance that have arisen as the major crisis responses, we identify striking similarities in institutional arrangements but also some variation in policy approaches. Given the effective containment of the pandemic spread and the comprehensive social safety nets, region‐wide measures such as consumption vouchers, prolonged unemployment benefits and emergency relief aids are of a one‐shot nature that will fall off once this crisis abates. The common trend of social policy responses to the crisis is largely an extension, not replacement or reinvention, of the existing institutional edifice of the East Asian welfare state. However, the pandemic crisis may offer a window of opportunity for gradual institutional change in light of the exacerbating social inequalities.

Nighttime light imagery provides a perspective for studying urbanization and socioeconomic changes. Traditional global regression models have been applied to explore the nonspatial relationship between nighttime lights and population density. In this study, geographically weighted regression (GWR) identifies the spatially varying relationships between population density and nighttime lights in mainland China. However, the rural population does not have a strong relationship with remote-sensing spectral features. The rural population estimation using nighttime light data alone easily identifies meaningless negative population density in the rural area. This study proposes an adaptive non-negative GWR (ANNGWR) to explore the spatial pattern of population density by using nonnegative constraints with an adaptive bandwidth of kernel. The ANNGWR solves the negative value of population density and serious overestimation of the western boundary. The result shows that the ANNGWR provides the best goodness-of-fit compared with linear regression and original GWR. This study applies Moran’s I index to prove that the ANNGWR substantially decreases the spatial autocorrelation of the model residual. The model offers a robust and effective approach for estimating the spatial patterns of regional population density solely on the basis of nighttime light imagery.

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The arms trade has come to the center stage of the international political economy. Yet only a few quantitative studies have been conducted on the political economy of the arms trade. This paper focuses on the security rents shared by trading partners in determining their arms trade relationship. We argue that the mechanism of reciprocity is better understood from the perspective of an international alliance network. Because the rents are likely to be transferred to other related members in a community, when a state is engaged in an arms deal with another state, it takes into account not only the direct dyadic relationship but also the alliance community to which the other state belongs. Based on this understanding, we employ social network analysis (SNA) to identify the effect of the international alliance community on the arms trade. Our findings suggest that if two states have a tie in a political alliance network, they are also likely to have a tie in the arms sale network. Moreover, we also find that the alliance network is a strong predictor of bilateral arms sales. Being in the same alliance community encourages two states to trade more arms with each other.

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