Explaining Korean Welfare State Development with New Empirical Data and Methods

Abstract

Selecting Korea as one of the conceptually classified East Asian welfare states, this paper aims to empirically investigate the determinants of Korean welfare state development. Linking the research question with the lively discussion on welfare state in Korea that is taking place domestically, this paper also aims to examine whether the development of the Korean welfare state has been influenced by politics of the left or by industrialization with functionalistic perspectives. We conduct an analysis first by regression analysis and then fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to examine the conditions of such development. A Korean Welfare State Dataset (KWSD) has been newly included in the Comparative Welfare State Dataset (CWSD) and we used this new dataset for our empirical analysis. Our empirical findings suggest that, at least up to the current point, factors other than economic development or industrialization are not robust enough to make a claim of a take-off of the Korean welfare state from its developmental stage. However, we also notice the influence of the left government and suggest that it is legitimate to expect an innovative change in the path of the Korean welfare state once the power resource theory is applicable.

Determinants of Social Insurance Coverage in the Philippines

“…However, results suggest that political determinants would probably represent the most important field for welfare development, due perhaps to the contention of Kim [13] that grouping subject Asian countries with some incoherent features among them would be a problem. This is in contrast to the findings of the following authors with regards to the following influential variables: Lin [14] modernization; Kim and Jung [15] modernization, globalization and power resources; Ahn and Baek [16], Rupp and Stapleton [17] feminist and market theories; Ahn and Lee [18] economic development and modernization; Park [19] effects of globalization and economic crisis; Croisant [20] demographic, economic and political trends; and Cristea et al [21] economic growth. Kaseke [2] studied the challenges of extending social security to the poor in an African perspective and found that one of the reasons why the coverage of formal social security systems is low is because the self-employed domestic workers and those employed in the informal sector are not participating in the scheme.…”

The Productivist Construction of Selective Welfare Pragmatism in China

“…There has been a considerable internationalization of research agendas, with a particular focus on East Asia (e.g. see Hwang ; Ahn and Lee ; Lin and Yi ; Hudson et al . ; Yu et al .…”

Revisiting the effectiveness of the employment‐oriented welfare state: Considering the quality of employment achievement

“…Because the value of public social expenditure varies depending on the size of the economy, it is controlled in the analysis by the level of GDP. Although aggregate public social expenditure has been criticized as a proxy for welfare effort (Esping‐Andersen, ; Kühner, ), since Wilensky (, p. 23) defined social security spending of gross national product (GNP) as a social security effort, public social expenditure as a percentage of economic size (such as gross national income or GDP) has been used as a variable to measure the welfare effort of a country (Ahn & Baek, ; Ahn & Lee, ; Bonoli, , ; Hong, ). This method has been widely used because of high availability for comparative study (Hong, ; Jensen, ) (Tables and ).…”