ABSTRACT
Having examined the politics of economic and political development in Pacifi c Asia in the previous chapters, I now turn to the social development of the region. In the West, social development is closely associated with the establishment of the welfare state, which took place after World War II. The term ‘welfare state’ does not have a precise meaning and is often ideologically charged. However, it broadly refers to a liberal democratic state, the role of which expands markedly in a capitalist economy with the objective of providing its citizens with a more or less generous but guaranteed standard of living, encompassing aspects such as health, education, housing and income maintenance. Such a pattern of social development in the West, underpinned by the notion of social entitlement, is widely interpreted as an almost inevitable culmination of more than two centuries of civil and political rights (Marshall 1963). Hence the currency of the convergence view, which sees industrialisation and democracy as the key factors likely to lead to the emergence of the Western-style welfare state in other parts of the world.
