ABSTRACT
In Korea, social provisions concerning the issues of unemployment and the labour market were thought of as being complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Yet many advanced industrialised societies introduced unemployment benefits and active labour market measures separately, as if these had been discrete entities. Originating as early as the 19th century, protection for the unemployed began as a mutual aid fund whereby trade unions provided unemployment benefits to the unemployed on a voluntary basis. In the early 1990s, the state began to provide subsides to the fund, for example in France, Norway and Denmark, followed by Britain, with its introduction of compulsory state provision on a three-party payment principle. Later in the 1960s, Germany took the lead in transforming unemployment benefit-centred provisions to a more comprehensive and active employment policy, followed by similar changes in Japan during the mid-1970s.
