This article looks at welfare state restructuring in Japan in the 1990s from the perspective of changes in gender relations and demography. Contrary to the retrenchment pressures exerted by economic and political globalization that figured predominantly in the 1980s, changes in gender relations and demographic patterns have been stimulating the Japanese welfare state in an expansionary direction, as witnessed by more active roles taken by the state in providing social care and promoting family-work reconciliation. Welfare state restructuring in Japan in the 1990s is interesting not only because of its juncture with a broader regime shift characterized by the collapse of the old-style conservative politics dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the reconfiguration of Japan's political economy but also because it underlines a new fluidity in bureaucratic policy-making processes as a result of an increasing politicization of social policy issues and the entry of new participants (such as women's groups) in the policy debate. Moreover, it helps us bring into sharper focus the relationships between gender and welfare state restructuring and to address the question of how changes in gender relations are stimulating welfare state responses.
If a ‘migrant in the family’ is the prevalent pattern of care work in Mediterranean societies today, what are the emergent patterns in other familialistic societies, and what factors are driving or impeding them? We address these questions by examining the cases of Japan, Korea, Canada, and the US. Our analysis shows that while care work patterns in all these four countries resemble those of the Mediterranean countries in their increased use of migrant care workers, they also differ from the Mediterranean and among themselves, partly because of their varying conceptualizations of nationhood. We argue that concepts of nationhood are significant but not all-determining in efforts to reconcile care work and migration regimes.
Drawing on theories of institutional evolution, this article contends that despite the centrality of occupationally based social insurance in postwar Korea and Taiwan (and thus the impression of institutional continuity), the welfare state has in fact deepened considerably. The analysis is structured around three distinct eras of social policy reform in Korea and Taiwan: the developmental state, democratic transition, and postindustrialism. The authors contend that during each of these eras, the institutional purposes of social policy were altered to meet certain socioeconomic objectives. New institutional purposes were grafted onto the prevailing social insurance model, changing the outcomes of social policy. The developmental state era was productivist in purpose, democratic reform during the 1980s reoriented social insurance toward universalist and redistributive principles, and the post-1997 era refocused social insurance to meet the imperatives of flexible labor markets, demographic shifts, and economic globalization.
This article compares state policies to support childcare in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, using fuzzy set ideal type analysis to determine the nature of institutional arrangements with respect to labour, money and time provisions. We then note their implications for familialization and defamilialization in the three countries. Our analysis suggests a common pattern towards the increased use of financial support amongst the three countries over time; however, this commonality does not mean their childcare policies are converging, as the financial supports differ in focus, with Japan concentrating on familialization by valuing family care, and Korea exclusively employing policy to facilitate the use of market-based care services. For its part, Taiwan has been strengthening familialization by increasing the leave compensation to value time off to provide care. The different labour, money and time dimensions vis-à-vis the familialization/defamilialization matrix suggest varying implications of institutional arrangements for gender.
This article examines how postindustrial pressures and political changes have shaped recent social policy reforms in Japan and South Korea. Postindustrial pressures are categorized intoexogenousandendogenousfactors: exogenous being economic globalization and internationalization, endogenous being changing family and gender relations and demographic shifts such as population aging and declining birthrates. I argue that we need to attend more closely to the interactions between postindustrial and political factors to explain social and welfare policies in these countries. The conventional view on East Asian welfare states no longer adequately explains recent social welfare policy changes in the region.
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