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ABSTRACT
East Asia’s economic and social structures came under pressure in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the productivist welfare capitalism (PWC) thesis faced a fundamental challenge. This paper explores the veracity of the PWC thesis by exploring six social policy fields, including education, health care services, family, old-age pensions, housing and protective labour market policy, in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan using fuzzy-set ideal type analysis (FsITA). The findings suggest that it is inaccurate to talk about one single, homogeneous welfare model in East Asia. Despite persistent similarities in regard to their cultural foundations, cases in Greater China and East Asia have distinctive social policy development trajectories often combining ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policies in unique ways.
Acknowledgements
A previous version of this article was presented at the EASP annual conference in Singapore 2015. Thanks to all participants in the conference for useful comments. Also, as this paper was part of my PhD project, I would like to express my special gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Stefan Kühner for his very helpful suggestions and comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Many studies have shown that child care provision also has positive impact on female participation in developed countries. However, the availability of data issue is significant in measuring child care provision, especially in the East Asian context. Hence, maternity leave is used solely in this paper.
2. All fuzzy scores of quantitative data were generated by R (R Core Team Citation2014) and using the QCA (Dusa and Alrik Citation2014) and SetMethods packages, respectively (Quaranta Citation2013b).
3. In 2011, a plan for twelve years of compulsory curriculum was developed in Taiwan. In 2012, the project was audited and it was finally implemented in 2014 (Ministry of Education Taiwan Citation2013).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nan Yang
Nan Yang is a Ph.D. Graduand in the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses primarily on comparative and international social policies. She is particularly interested in applying the set-theoretic methods to exam the welfare developments.