A Comparative Study of East Asian Welfare Regimes

This book takes Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Hong Kong as comparative cases to investigate why these East Asian societies have followed strikingly different welfare-regime reform pathways during their political-economic transitions.

Earlier "East Asian welfare regime" scholarship has often relied on single-frame concepts — Confucian culture, the developmental state, productivism — to cover the entire region. Such framings obscure the substantive differences in capitalist varieties, political systems, and labour-capital structures that distinguish these societies from one another. This book takes a comparative historical-institutional approach, returning to each case's specific historical context to reconsider why institutional paths diverge.

Through cross-territorial comparison, the book interrogates the limits of the standard "East Asian welfare regime" perspective and proposes a more granular diversity thesis: East Asia is not one regime, but a constellation of developmental pathways.