This article aims to outline main features of the East Asian welfare model, to understand its past development and assess lessons that can be learned for other developing and developed countries. It describes the particular path of welfare state development in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, by focusing particularly on developmental and political aspects of welfare state development. In the final part of the study, particular features of the East Asian welfare model are outlined, and thus the existence of a distinct, ideal‐typical welfare regime in East Asia substantiated.

This paper focuses on recent developments in ‘ideal-typical’ welfare analysis, including findings on East Asia, Eastern Central Europe and, for the first time, Latin America. The characteristics of a new ideal-typical welfare regime in large parts of Latin America are singled out, looking at key features of major welfare state systems.

This article applies ideal-typical welfare state theory in analysing the recent transition and the current position of welfare state systems in Eastern Central Europe, taking the cases of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia. The article argues that Eastern Central European welfare state systems have returned to their historical and cultural roots of welfare state formation and development, to the time before the onset of state socialism in Soviet times. First, social security policies and social and labour laws were established when the vast bulk of Eastern Central European countries were member states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sharing the same political economy, legal system and culture. Over the last 20 years, the socialist system of employmentbased social services and benefits has been replaced with Bismarckian-type social security policy and systems. While there are major alterations here and there -in ideal-typical perspective -the four countries under scrutiny share all the major traits of Continental European (Christian Democratic) welfare regimes.