New Perspectives on the Welfare State offers an appraisal of comparative social policy and applies it to our current uncertainties concerning European communities and European-North American and East Asian relationships.

East Asia is at the heart of the global economic transformation, and the countries of the region are witnessing rapidly changing labour markets, alongside the pressure to cut production costs and lower taxes in order to become successful ‘competition states’. These changes have resulted in increased welfare demands which governments, organizations and agencies across the region have had to address. This book examines welfare regimes in the Greater China region, encompassing mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. In so doing, it explores the ways in which the rapid growth and internationalisation of the economy across Greater China is presenting new social policy challenges that governments, social welfare organizations and agencies in the region are having to respond to. Rather than simply describing and categorising welfare systems, the contributors to this volume add to our understanding of how one of the major economic transformations of the contemporary era in East Asia is shaping welfare provision in the region. In turn, in this context of economic change, they examine the new strategies and measures that have been adopted in order to reduce the heavy burden on the state in terms of welfare provision, whilst also attempting to diversify funding and provision sources to meet the pressing welfare needs. Based upon extensive fieldwork by leading scholars of social policy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Asian social policy, comparative development and social policy, social welfare and Chinese studies.

Contributors address questions about gender equality in a Confucian context across a wide and varied social policy landscape, from Korea and Taiwan, where Confucian culture is deeply embedded, through China, with its transformations from Confucianism to communism and back, to the mixed cultural environments of Hong Kong and Japan.

From the welfare state’s origins in Europe, the idea of human welfare being organized through a civilized, institutionalized and uncorrupt state has caught the imagination of social activists and policy-makers around the world. This is particularly influential where rapid social development is taking place amidst growing social and gender inequality. This book reflects on the growing academic and political interest in global social policy and ‘globalizing welfare’, and pays particular attention to developments in Northern European and North-East Asian countries.

The story of China's spectacular economic growth is well known. Less well known is the country's equally dramatic, though not always equally successful, social policy transition. Between the mid- 1990s and mid-2000s---the focal period for this book---China's central government went a long way toward consolidating the social policy framework that had gradually emerged in piecemeal fashion during the initial phases of economic liberalization. Major policy decisions during the focal period included adopting a single national pension plan for urban areas, standardizing unemployment insurance, (re)establishing nationwide rural health care coverage, opening urban education systems to children of rural migrants, introducing trilingual education policies in ethnic minority regions, expanding college enrolment, addressing the challenge of HIV/AIDS more comprehensively, and equalizing social welfare spending across provinces, among others. Unresolved is the direction of policy in the face of longer-term industrial and demographic trends---and the possibility of a chronically weak global economy. Chinese Social Policy in a Time of Transition offers scholars, practitioners, students, and policymakers a foundation from which to explore those issues based on a composite snapshot of Chinese social policy at its point of greatest maturation prior to the 2007 global crisis.

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 offers a global level comparison between welfare states, actual and emerging, in Europe, East Asia, Australia, North & Latin America. The consequences of an ageing population, deregulation and heightened inequality are discussed in detail.