ABSTRACT
From 1990 onwards, the debate over welfare regimes has revolved around Esping-Andersen’s (1990, 1997) three worlds of welfare capitalism, comprising the liberal, the conservative-corporatist and the social democratic welfare regime. However, Esping-Andersen’s welfare regimes have been criticised for only being applicable to “those capitalist states so strongly affected by their social policy” and have been deemed irrelevant to those states whose social policy is largely subordinate to other policies (Holliday, 2000: 708). Moreover, commentators point out that the basic features of welfare systems in East Asia are largely different from their counterparts in the West (Goodman and Peng, 1996; Kwon, 1997; White and Goodman, 1998). An increasing body of literature is emerging which suggests that the East Asian tiger economies, namely, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, have distinct welfare models. These models include the East Asian social welfare regime of Goodman and Peng (1996), the Confucian welfare state of Jones (1993), the liberal and the conservative welfare models of Ramesh (2004), the conservative regime of Aspalter (2006), the productivist welfare regime of Holliday and Wilding (2003) and the developmental welfare state of Kwon (2005). Among these models, Kwon’s welfare developmentalism is the most substantial as its existence has been reconfirmed by Lee and Ku’s (2007) study.
