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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSocial policy and society : a journal of the Social Policy Association Vol. 19; no. 4; pp. 613 - 627
Main Authors Yang, Nan, Kühner, Stefan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.10.2020
Subjects
Candidates
Education policy
Employment policies
Family policy
Fuzzy sets
Health care
Health education
Health services
Housing authorities
Housing market
Labor market
Pensions
Public housing
Radicalism
Social policy
Themed Section: Global Welfare Regimes Revisited
Welfare
Hong Kong China
East Asia
China
Taiwan
social investment
fuzzy set analysis
set-theoretic methods
East Asian welfare models
Productivist welfare capitalism
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1474-7464
1475-3073
DOI:10.1017/S147474641900054X