Despite its impressive economic growth, East Asia is facing daunting challenges in mitigating its social problems, including chronic poverty and worsening social inequality. The past decade has seen growing scholarly interest in the development of East Asian social policies not only because of the sheer size of the population and its global impact, but also due to the stark contrast between this region’s economic prosperity and the ongoing issue of severe social inequality. This book presents a collection of studies on aspects of social protection in East Asian Chinese societies, including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Contributions by leading social policy scholars working in and on the region aim to promote scholarly understanding of the pressures facing social protection systems in East Asia, identify existing gaps and emerging social policy issues and review the effectiveness of existing programmes. The evidence presented and insights generated will promote further debate and facilitate meaningful comparative social policy studies in the region and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

Dramatic socio-economic transformations over the last two decades have brought social policy and social welfare issues to prominence in many East Asian societies. Since the 1990s and in response to national as well as global pressure, there have been substantial developments and reforms in social policy in the region but the development paths have been uneven. Until recently, comparative analysis of East Asian social policy tends to have focused on the established welfare state of Japan and the emerging welfare regimes of four Tiger Economies. Much of the recent debate indeed preceded Chinas re-emergence onto the world economy. In this context, this Handbook brings China more fully into the contemporary social policy debates in East Asia. Organised around five themes from welfare state developments, to theories and methodologies, to current social policy issues, the Handbook presents original research from leading specialists in the fields, and provides a fresh and updated perspective to the study of social policy. Providing a comparative international approach, this Handbook will appeal to academics, researchers and students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels working in the fields of social policy, as well as policy makers and practitioners who are interested in social policy lessons from other societies.

For many politicians and observers in the West, East Asia has provided a broad range of positive images of the state's intervention in society. Neoliberals grew excited by popular welfare systems that cost little in expenditure and bureaucracy. Social-democrats thought they had found a model for social cohesion and equality. In fact the reality in East Asia is rather different from these stereotypes. In this book six specialists of six different societies in East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore and Hong Kong) examine the role of the state in their welfare systems. There are detailed case studies on pensions, health insurance, housing and personal social services. They provide an up-to-date detailed account of how these systems have developed as well as an examination of the question of whether these welfare regimes are the natural outgrowth of cultural traditions or the result of economic and political conditions. This broad-ranging and detailed study will be welcomed by both students and policy makers as the first proper academic study in English to have such a wide coverage of this topic. Its clarity and authority should come as a welcome alternative to the more common misconceptions about Asian society.

This book focuses on relatively unexplored areas in pension and health care arrangements, including financing, in East Asia. The book aims to fill the literature gap on social protection in East Asia by covering issues such as pension and health care arrangements in the depopulating high income countries of Japan and Korea; the challenges of the pay-out phase in Defined Contribution (DC) arrangements in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore; and the extension of coverage of social protection schemes in China, India, and Indonesia. It also reviews social protection from a much wider perspective and extends coverage of social protection in terms of both the proportion of the population with access to the social protection scheme and the types of risks faced by the households and by society as a whole. The book also gives attention to reforms of civil service pensions.

This text puts the spotlight on the Chinese and Sout-East Asian welfare systems, providing and up-to-date assessment of their character and development. In particular it examines the underlying assumptions of these systems and how the processes of globalisation are impacting on them.

Social Policy has been a key dimension of dynamic economic growth in East Asia's 'little tigers' and is also a prominent strand of their responses to the financial crisis of the late 1990s. This systematic comparative analysis of social policy in the region focuses on the key sectors of education, health, housing and social security. It sets these sectoral analyses in wider contexts of debates about developmental states, the East Asian welfare model and globalization.

Social Policy and Change in East Asia is a collection of essays from a group of indigenous East Asian social policy researchers who met bi-annually to discuss social development issues. The book’s focus is the policy responses of respective East Asian government since the 2008 financial tsunami struck the region. Together, the essays in Social Policy and Change in East Asia argue that traditional social policy approach has failed to account for the problem of economic volatility and to devise policy measures that can promote long-term stability. Avoiding a static and Eurocentric approach, the authors of this book seek to unravel the meaning of the social development approach in various policy contexts. This book supports a dynamic understanding of social policy formulation that does not neglect the problem of economic turbulence in policy and planning.