East-Asian Welfare Regimes: Trying to pin down a moving target

11th Annual International ADI Conference | 18-19 June 2019   
Asian Dynamics Initiative, University of Copenhagen
South Campus, Njalsgade 120, 2300 Copenhagen S

Conveners: Peter Abrahamson, Dept. of Sociology, University of Copenhagen and Chanung Park, Dept. of Sociology, Yonsei University

Developments of welfare entitlements and provisions have spread across East Asia during the last decades challenging the earlier characterization of the region being dominated by a Confucian and productist or developmental approach to citizens’ social rights and obligations. The change first occurred within social insurance with a focus on healthcare and pensions, which, for a while, led social scientists to further characterize East-Asia as an informal care regime. Thus, we referred to social care for children, handicapped and frail elderly as family issues not included in state intervention. This perspective has already proven to be obsolete because of the rapid development in the entire region toward more emphasis on personal social services and expansion of healthcare, often in the form of Long-Term-Care-Insurance, or functional equivalents hereof, and childcare in various forms.

The speed of development within the region is a challenge for social sciences, but also an opportunity for exploring an exciting period in East Asia’s contemporary history. Social citizenship rights are being strengthened in all of the countries and territories of the region, but to various degrees and utilizing different pathways. Mainland China, Japan and South Korea seem to move in a direction of a welfare mix where the state takes a wide responsibility for financing care services, but, to various degrees, leave it to the market to provide the same services. Taiwan together with the city states of Macau, Hong Kong and Singapore seem to have chosen a more private/civil society approach which to a large extent involves engaging migrant domestic care workers. Hence, the welfare diamond in various East Asian territories emphasize market, state, NGOs and family differently, but they all point to a stronger responsibility, financial or otherwise, for the public sector.

We therefore call for papers addressing issues of social welfare and social wellbeing, including healthcare across East-Asia. We particularly, but not exclusively, invite comparative studies. We are interested in attempts to explain the differences in development trends, and we invite evaluative studies analyzing the consequences of the different development paths.

Download abstracts here (PDF)