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

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.

The complementary roles between clientelism and familism in social policy development

“…But since the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997–1998, this model has come under strain from social conditions (eg, poverty, inequality, and mass unemployment) and broad disruptions to political‐economy stability have encouraged many countries to search for alternative welfare configurations. This has stimulated a redesign of dominant social policy approaches into several more types such as redistributive, inclusive, and protective (Yang & Kühner, 2020).…”

Who should care? Exploring the views and experiences of individuals in negotiating solutions for health security

“…For instance, characterisations of most Asian (including Indonesia) and Latin American countries would coincide with this depiction. Notwithstanding, recent research on comparative welfare regime (Leyer, 2020;Roumpakis, 2020;Yang and K€ uhner, 2020) identifies there are many various changes along with the development of domestic and global political economy in respective countries. Some countries located in north east part, such as China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, have experienced a radical shift in their welfare institutional arrangement over the past 3 decades, making them, to some extent, comparable to the welfare state regime.…”

Revisiting Global Welfare Regime Classifications

“…It is perhaps not a coincidence that a majority of attempts to explain welfare regime transitions adopt a regional focus (Barrientos, 2009;Choi, 2012Choi, , 2013Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2018;Clement, 2020;Yang and Kühner, 2020). While the number of cases varies significantly, reflecting perhaps different methodological choices and data availability, the criteria for establishing transitions are not similar.…”

“…For example, Barrientos (2009) and Choi (2012Choi ( , 2013 explore welfare regime-level reforms as well as official government data to determine the nature and direction of the transition. Other scholars map transitions as a temporal shift against either pre-determined ideal types (Yang and Kühner, 2020) or by applying data reduction techniques (Yu, 2014b;Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2018;Clement, 2020).…”

“…This is also reflected on the evidence used and clusters produced. The identified clusters refer to pre-determined, by the theory, groupings (Hudson and Kühner, 2012;Kuypers, 2014;Yang, 2017), empirically driven exercises that do not name and therefore attribute any properties to their groupings (Yu, 2012(Yu, , 2014a(Yu, , 2014bClement, 2020 8 ) and ones that capture change (Martínez Franzoni and Sánchez-Ancochea, 2018;Yang and Kühner, 2020). The evidence utilised ranges from interviews, government reports and official statistics to international cross-sectional data.…”