A corporate-centred conservative welfare regime: three-layered protection in Japan

ABSTRACT

The Japanese welfare model is identified by the unified typology method of welfare and production regime (Schröder 2013) as the corporate-centred conservative welfare regime (CCWR), a subgroup of the conservative welfare regime. The major company cross-class alliance (Ito, 1988) has played a pivotal role in constructing the CCWR under the group-based coordinate market economy (Hall & Soskice, 2001, 2007). It encompasses the following key characteristics: a male breadwinner-based social insurance with status-dependent programs and a greater role of occupational welfare. Therefore, it fragments social protection into a three-layered structure where regular employees of major enterprises, especially men, enjoy the most generous benefits from their company and government, followed by permanent labourers of small- to medium-sized firms who are provided for relatively modestly, while only minimum governmental benefit is allocated to non-regular employees.

KEYWORDS:

• Japanese welfare model
• unified typology
• production regime
• corporate-centred corporatist welfare regime
• male breadwinner model
• dualism

Acknowledgments

A previous version of this article was presented at the 16th Annual EASP conference at the National Taiwan University from 2nd-3 July 2019. The authors would like to thank the organizer and participants of this event, Shih-Jiunn Shi, Chung-Yang Yeh, Kuehner Stefan as well as also two anonymous reviewers and the coordinator of the special issue, Ka Ho Mok. All errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI Grant [26285140, 17K13682]; JSPS KAKENHI Grant [19K02229, 19H01647].

Notes on contributors

Masato Shizume

Masato Shizume is Professor of Social Policy at the College of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University. His research field is comparative pension policy and poverty in old age. He has published many journal papers and book chapters, as well as edited books on the public pension and related topics.

Masatoshi Kato

Masatoshi Kato is Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University. His research interests include comparative political economy, institutional theory, and meta-theory of social sciences. He is the author of A Political Analysis of Welfare State Realignment (2012) (in Japanese). His works on comparative welfare states in English have appeared in the Ritsumeikan Journal of Humanities, Human and Social Sciences, and the Yokohama Law Review.

Ryozo Matsuda

Ryozo Matsuda is Professor of International Health Policy at the College of Social Sciences, Ritsumeikan University. His current main field is comparative health policy and systems research with a focus on high-income countries. He has also been continuously involved in policy research relevant to equity in health, inclusive health care, prison health, and the right to health. He has published numerous journal papers and book chapters, and edited books on health and social policy. Currently, he is serving as Director of the Institute of Human Sciences, a multidisciplinary research institute at Ritsumeikan University. Professor Matsuda has also been President of the Japanese Society for Health and Welfare Policy since 2017.