Introduction

The modern Western welfare state has its roots in the notion of an entitlement deriving from the citizenship model as expounded by T.H. Marshall (1950). What thereby becomes a social right to welfare has deeply influenced the development of welfare systems in Western countries, although different countries have established different national standards of social rights and these have been expressed through different programmes (Marshall, 1950; Esping-Andersen, 1990). However, faced with recurrent economic crises and the resultant ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ (O’Connor, 1973; Gough, 2000), Western welfare states have, in general, shifted from concern with the amelioration of market inequalities, to a concern with the marketisation of public services and the individualisation of social risk. Welfare systems based on the idea of social rights are also moving away from welfare and towards ‘welfare-to-work’ (workfare) systems for those able to work, by shifting emphasis from rights to duties and by introducing more conditions and means testing on previously universally guaranteed welfare schemes. For example, the recent United Kingdom (UK) government's welfare reform White Paper, entitled 21st Century Welfare (DWP, 2010), again confirms a direction towards workfare and concomitant enhanced individual responsibility: ‘Work and personal responsibility must be at the heart of the new benefits system. This should provide support backed up by a strong system of conditionality that makes clear what is expected of claimants in return for the support they receive’ (DWP, 2010, Chapter 1).

While Western welfare states, under the pressure of a globalised neoliberal economic order, are moving towards workfare systems characterised by the retrenchment of social rights, the South Korean welfare system, called the National Basic Livelihood Security System (NBLSS), already incorporated a workfare element as early as the late 1990s as a response to the effects of the 1997 Asian economic crisis (AEC). However, the establishment of workfare in South Korea appears to represent a case for neither the ‘shrinking welfare state’ under globalisation nor the shifting emphasis from rights to duties that currently dominates Western welfare state thinking. Rather than substantiating the expectation that welfare systems retrench in the wake of economic crises and the resultant economic restructuring that generally follows, the AEC and the resultant economic restructuring demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) in the case of South Korea, was actually accompanied by an expansion of the welfare system in significant ways.