The East Asian Welfare Model

This book revisits after about close to 20 years the East Asian Welfare Model when looked at from an ideal-typical perspective. Ideal-typical welfare regimes do not change, in general, quickly, they are stable, due to the higher level of observation applied (using a high-flying bird’s or satellite’s perspective).

Twenty years, however, are a long time also in welfare state system development. A great deal of mega events and mega trends have impacted on social policy all over the world in these last two decades. These include the Covid 19 pandemic, gender movements, rock-bottom low overall fertility (in the post-industrial setting), global production shifts (a.k.a. globalization of industrial production), and last but not least technological revolution brought upon by super-digitalization and artificial intelligence applications, and information society in general, and with it technological unemployment of a large parts of a whole new generation having become unemployable while they have been highly trained at college and university levels.

It is high time to look at East Asia welfare state systems up close again, and the right theoretical and methodological lens, i.e. applying ideal-typical theory and methodology, to an otherwise not graspable fully dynamic and intertwined phenomenon: continued welfare state growth amidst crises and change.