Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-c9gpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T04:33:58.422Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond the Limits of the Productivist Regime: Capturing Three Decades of East Asian Welfare Development with Fuzzy Sets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

Nan Yang  and
Stefan Kühner
Nan Yang
Affiliation:
Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York, UK E-mail: angelia.nan@gmail.com
Stefan Kühner
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Centre for Social Policy and Social Change, Lingnan University, Hong Kong E-mail: stefankuehner@LN.edu.hk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the ‘limits of productivist regimes’ (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare. This article develops three distinct types of East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical, employing set-theoretic methods. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, including education, health care, family policy, old-age pensions, public housing, and passive labour market policy, in six East Asian societies: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. We find that all cases except Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced at least one radical shift in their welfare models over the past three decades (1990–2016). East Asian governments have increasingly combined quantitative expansion or retrenchment of ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policy structures but have done so in unique ways. South Korea has followed the most ‘balanced’ approach to welfare development and stands out as the best candidate for further type-specific expansions moving forward.

Keywords

Productivist welfare capitalismEast Asian welfare modelsset-theoretic methodsfuzzy set analysissocial investment
Type
Themed Section: Global Welfare Regimes Revisited
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 613 - 627
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahamson, P. (2017) ‘East Asian welfare regime: obsolete ideal-type or diversified reality’, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 10, 1, 90–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ADB (2013) Social Protection Index, Mandaluyong: ADB.Google Scholar
Brhane, M., Mason, D. and Payne, G. (2014) Access to Affordable and Low-income Housing in East Asia and the Pacific, Washington, DC: World Bank Group.Google Scholar
China National Bureau of Statistics (2019) National Data, Beijing: National Bureau of Statistics, http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/Statisticaldata/AnnualData/ [accessed 02.03.2019].Google Scholar
Gough, I. (2004) ‘East Asia: the limits of productivist regimes’, in Gough, I. and Wood, G. (eds.), Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 169–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green-Pedersen, C. (2004) ‘The dependent variable problem within the study of welfare state retrenchment: defining the problem and looking for solutions’, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 6, 1, 3–14.Google Scholar
Hirayama, Y. (2007) ‘Housing and state strategy in post-war Japan’, in Groves, R., Murie, A. and Watson, C. (eds.), Housing and the New Welfare State: Perspectives from East Asia and Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 101–26.Google Scholar
Holliday, I. (2000) ‘Productivist welfare capitalism: social policy in East Asia’, Political Studies, 48, 4, 706–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holliday, I. (2005) ‘East Asian social policy in the wake of the financial crisis: farewell to productivism?’, Policy and Politics, 33, 1, 145–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, J. and Kühner, S. (2010) ‘Beyond the dependent variable problem: the methodological challenges of capturing productive and protective dimensions of social policy’, Social Policy and Society, 9, 2, 167–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, J. and Kühner, S. (2012) ‘Analyzing the productive and protective dimensions of welfare: looking beyond the OECD’, Social Policy and Administration, 46, 1, 35–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hudson, J., Kühner, S. and Yang, N. (2014) ‘Productive welfare, the East Asian ‘model’ and beyond: placing welfare types in Greater China into context’, Social Policy and Society, 13, 2, 301–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, S. S. (2012) ‘The Republic of Korea: pension system overview and reform directions’, in Park, D. (ed.), Pension Systems and Old-Age Income Support in East and Southeast Asia: Overview and Reform Directions, Abingdon: Routledge, 76–100.Google Scholar
Kim, S. T. (2010) Korea’s Unemployment Insurance in the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis and Adjustments in the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, ADBI Working Paper Series, Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kühner, S. (2015) ‘The dependent variable problem within the comparative analysis of the welfare state revisited: what if we waited a little longer?’, in Irving, Z., Fenger, M., and Hudson, J. (eds.), Social Policy Review 27: Analysis and Debate in Social Policy, Bristol: Policy Press.Google Scholar
Lee, V. (2000) Unemployment Insurance and Assistance Systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong: Legislative Council Secretariat.Google Scholar
Lee, S. A., and Qian, J. (2017) ‘The evolving Singaporean welfare state’, Social Policy and Administration, 51, 6, 916–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ministry of Manpower Singapore (2019) Maternity Leave, https://www.mom.gov.sg/employment-practices/leave/maternity-leave [accessed 03. 03.2019].Google Scholar
Mok, K. H. (2000) ‘Marketizing higher education in post-Mao China’, International Journal of Educational Development, 20, 2, 109–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
OECD (2019a) Family Database, OECD: Paris, http://www.oecd.org/els/family/database.htm [accessed 20.04.2019].Google Scholar
OECD (2019b) Social Expenditure Database, OECD: Paris, http://www.oecd.org/social/expenditure.htm [accessed 20.04.2019].Google Scholar
OECD (2019c) The OECD Tax-benefit Data Portal, OECD: Paris, http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/benefits-and-wages/data/ [accessed 20.04.2019].Google Scholar
Papadopoulos, T. and Roumpakis, A. (2017) ‘Family as a socio-economic actor in the political economies of East and South-East Asian welfare capitalisms’, Social Policy and Administration, 51, 6, 857–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ragin, C. C. (2000) Fuzzy-Set Social Science, London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Vis, B. (2008) ‘The direction and scope of social policy change: regime specific or radical shift towards workfare?’, Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, 10, 2, 151–69.Google Scholar
Wang, Y. P. (2007) ‘From socialist welfare to support of home-ownership: the experience of China’, in Groves, R., Murie, A. and Watson, C. (eds.), Housing and the New Welfare State, Aldershot: Ashgate, 127–54.Google Scholar
Wilding, P. (2008) ‘Is the East Asian welfare model still productive?’, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 1, 1, 18–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yang, N. (2017) ‘East Asia in transition: re-examining the East Asian welfare model using fuzzy sets’, Journal of Asian Public Policy, 10, 1, 104–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Yang and Kühner supplementary material

Yang and Kühner supplementary material

Download Yang and Kühner supplementary material(File)
File 90.9 KB