Previous studies of East Asian welfare regimes focus on similarities between social security schemes. In contrast, this paper explores cross-national variations in public–private pension mixes in six welfare states: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Our research echoes the pension policy analysis of international organisations but takes a step forward with emphasis on the historical and institutional characteristics of the respective pension systems. The analysis identifies three institutional patterns. First, the statist pension system (Taiwan and China) primarily relies on public pensions to provide old-age security, with private pensions playing a rather minor role. Second, in the dualist pension system (Japan and Korea) both public and private pensions work in parallel to ensure retirement income, though a clear security gap exists between workers in the formal and informal economies. Finally, the individualist pension system (Hong Kong and Singapore) is characterised by genuine fully funded individual accounts, emphasising citizens’ own responsibilities for ensuring old-age security. These three types of pension systems demonstrate distinct institutional characteristics and policy outcomes, illustrated by the juxtaposition of their institutional structures as well as by the comparison of key indicators collected from government reports and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection of East Asian pension policies and a diagnosis of the distinct challenges confronted by each of the various pension patterns.
The agenda of social investment (SI) has been gaining ground during the 2000–2020 time frame in Northeast Asia, especially for family policies. Because of a similar policy legacy of developmentalism, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan might have more room to pursue equally bold SI strategies. Nevertheless, they took different directions, and, specifically, South Korea was the boldest SI “path shifter,” in comparison to “slow-moving” Japan and Taiwan. By analyzing welfare attitude data sets, we found that South Korea in the early 2000s was in a favorable position for SI-oriented family reform, with high public demand, high policy salience, and a lighter policy legacy; but the same did not happen for Japan and Taiwan. In Japan, family policy seems to have become more politicized in the 2010s, and only recently the time might have grown ripe for more SI-oriented policy reforms. Taiwan potentially has a constituency of young and female voters who support family policy, but the salience of work–family reconciliation has been delayed, inciting a very dynamic state of affairs in family policy reform only very recently. As a consequence, SI-oriented reforms in family policies took a different shape in these three economies. This chapter argues that public demand for SI policies is a relevant trigger for government responsiveness but only in the context of a favorable policy legacy and a high policy salience.
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