East Asian Welfare Regimes: Testing the Hypothesis of the Developmental Welfare State

Abstract

Following the three welfare regimes constructed by Esping-Andersen, many scholars have addressed the question of whether there may be a further type of regime, differing from the categories of liberal, conservative and social democratic, pertaining to other parts of the world. Discussion has centred largely on East Asia and, in particular, on the notion of the developmental/productivist welfare regime. Yet these discussions have been based more on conceptual classification than empirical analysis. This article attempts to fill in the gap, with reference to the developmental characteristics of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. A set of  indicators is developed for the factor and cluster analysis of  countries, based on data from the  s and  s. The results indicate the existence of a new group, consisting of Taiwan and South Korea, which is distinct from Esping-Andersen's three regimes -unlike Japan, which remains a composite of various regime types. Regime characteristics peculiar to the cases of Taiwan and South Korea include: low/ medium social security expenditure, high social investment, more extensive gender discrimination in salary, medium/high welfare stratification, a high non-coverage rate for pensions, high individual welfare loading, and high family welfare responsibility. When compared with Esping-Andersen's three regimes, the East Asian developmental regime shows similarity with his conservative model, in respect of welfare stratification, while the non-coverage of welfare entitlements is similar to his liberal model. There is virtually no evidence of any similarity between the developmental welfare regime and Esping-Andersen's social democratic regime type.

Welfare states, flexible employment, and health: A critical review

“…We allocated these articles into one of six welfare state regimes: Scandinavian (Sc), Bismarckian (B), AngloSaxon (A-S), Southern European (S), Eastern European (EE), and East Asia (EA). Adapting Ferrera's four-regime welfare typology mentioned above [16], two additional typologies were included in order to better account for the large volume of literature extracted: an Eastern European regime borrowed from Fenger's typology [22], and an East Asian regime borrowed from Lee and Ku [26]. After performing a scholarly investigation of their welfare state conditions, Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United States were classified as Anglo-Saxon welfare states [24].…”

“…This regime has been described as embodying "the periphery of the core," presenting a clear distinction between itself and its Bismarckian and Anglo-Saxon counterparts [16]. Current research has also contributed to the further expansion of conventional welfare regime typologies so as to account for Eastern European [21][22][23][24] and East Asian welfare state regimes [25,26].…”

A study of non-government child welfare services in Taiwan focused on children in need of child welfare service intervention

“…Some scholars adopt the efforts of Esping-Andersen's liberal, conservative and social democratic regimes, and state that the East Asian countries are recognised as a residual approach which is similar to the characteristics of the liberal regime (Walker & Wong, 2005), the conservative regime (Aspalter, 2001a), or a hybrid of liberal and conservative models (Esping-Andersen, 2002;Ku & Jones Finer, 2007). Other scholars argue that there might be an emerging type of welfare regime other than Esping-Andersen's classification, and conclude that the East Asian countries are referred to as a developmental/productivist welfare system regime, where families and the market play an important role in designing welfare provision (Holliday, 2000;Lee & Ku, 2007;. This debate is still occurring in the literature.…”

“…For example, Ku (1997) asserted that Taiwan can be appropriately described as a conservative welfare regime because of two main reasons. Firstly, in Taiwan In contrast, Lee and Ku (2007) argued that Taiwan is clustered into a new type of regime, a developmental/productivist welfare regime, with an important characteristic that ‗the family is supposed to take more responsibility for social services and social care ' (Lee & Ku, 2007, pp. 201-209).…”

Developmental Welfare Capitalism in East Asia with a Special Emphasis on South Korea

“…Within this "politics of development policy labelling" (Wood 1985), the Korean welfare system, as a unique social model, has been labelled as developmental welfare state Ku 2007, andLee et al 2011), minimalist welfare state (Lee et al 2011), productive welfare model (Ramesh et al 2004), productivist welfare capitalism (PWC) (Holliday 2000(Holliday , 2005, productivist social policy (Kwon & Holliday 2007), (emerging) productivist (Wood & Gough 2006, 1706 Beginning with policy, PWC is characterised by a broad thrust that prioritises economic growth, and makes this the fundamental orientation of policy makers not only across economic sectors but also across social and cultural sectors. Policy spheres that tend to be thought of as straddling the economic/social divide are therefore read in economic rather than social terms.…”