ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the new social investment policies in Japan and South Korea to understand the factors behind the changes. It argues that social investment policies in these countries are changing because of internal and external factors. The idea of social investment in the West could be traced back to the early twentieth century, to programs such as Alva and Gunner Myrdal's proposal of productive social policy in Sweden, the New Deal in the United States and the Beveridge Plan in Britain. In Japan, the combination of protracted economic stagnation, steady demographic ageing and low fertility had significantly reshaped public and policy debates on social investment since 1990. Until the 1990s, social investment in Japan, aside from public health and education, was largely limited to small employment support and skills training programs found within the Employment Insurance (EI) system. About a decade after Japan had adopted its new social investment idea, South Korea also came to a similar conclusion.
