these societies were the military and civil servants. Support for the military as a precursor to wider income protection measures is not a differentiating feature of East Asian countries, however, as Skocpol (1995) has shown this to have been an important factor in US developments. Measures to extend some insurance-based benefits to industrial workers followed next in South Korea and Taiwan, and securing the support of the emergent industrial ‘working class’ was important for the state-led growth which is regarded as so significant in these societies (Ku, 1997; Kwon, 1999). More universalistic policies only really got on to the political agenda with the emergence of democracy in these countries in the 1980s.
At the same time, Castles and Mitchell’s argument about other ways in which states may promote social welfare may also be relevant for East Asian societies. Over much of the period between the Second World War and the severe financial crisis which shook East Asia in 1997, these societies experienced substantial growth with minimal unemployment. Hence, inasmuch as governments secured social support, they did it through their success in generating rapid income growth for the majority of the people. Data showing relatively low income inequality in South Korea and Taiwan offer additional evidence in support of this proposition (Ramesh, 2004, pp. 21–2).
Holliday has developed an alternative approach to the analysis of the special characteristics of East Asian societies, describing them as belonging to a ‘regime’ type characterized by ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ (Holliday, 2000, 2005), in which the orientation towards growth has been of key importance for social policy development. This point is relevant beyond East Asia given the argument that global economic forces make it increasingly difficult to defend the ‘social democratic’ version of the ‘truce between capital and labour’, or to extend it to later developing welfare systems. In this sense there are grounds for arguing that the ‘liberal’ regimes in Esping-Andersen’s theory are also ‘productivist’. But Holliday (2005, p. 148) suggests that the state has taken a more positive role in East Asian societies: ‘In a productivist state, the perceived necessity of building a society capable of driving forward growth generates some clear tasks for social policy, led by education but also taking in other sectors.’ While Holliday is making some important links here with discussions of these societies as exemplars of state-led growth, it is worth noting that in emphasizing education policy he is citing a policy area not considered by Esping-Andersen in his formulation of regime theory (see Chapter 7 for further discussion on this point).
An important reservation about the suggestions that East Asian societies are following a trajectory not envisaged in Esping-Andersen’s theory, is that it is important in comparative studies not to lose sight of the extent to which policy learning takes place over time and between nations. The newly industrialized Asian economies have had the opportunity to observe the strengths and weaknesses of the policies adopted earlier in other places and to learn from them selectively. They have, inevitably, been engaged with the new global debate about the economic costs of generous welfare benefit systems but have drawn their own conclusions on the value of social spending.
There is another kind of contribution to the debate about East Asia which goes further than questions about whether nations can be slotted into Esping-Andersen’s regime typology or whether there are other types of regime. This is an argument that the whole regime approach embodies ‘Western’ ethnocentric assumptions about the role of the state and about welfare development as a product of the ‘truce’ between capital and labour (see Walker and Wong, 2004). The early comparative analyses of East Asia, while elaborate, were focused on a number of (relatively) small East Asian states with little attention to China. More recently, and particularly since the 2008 crisis, interest in the development in social policy in China is increasing (Cook and Lam, 2011) as its global influence has transformed. In their earlier analysis, Walker and Wong (2004, p. 124) observed that China had not been considered a ‘welfare state’ because it
lacks a Western-style political democracy and is not a fully capitalist economy. In spite of these two institutional ‘anomalies’ from the perspective of the Western construction, it had managed and is still able to provide sufficient social protection to its urban population, albeit with enormous difficulties at the present moment.
They note that ‘a poverty line, with its accompanying benefit provisions, was first promulgated in 1993 in Shanghai and now covers all urban areas’, and contrast this with their previous analysis of provision in the pre-reform era (prior to 1978) when ‘comprehensive welfare was provided through the “work-units” (that is, state-owned enterprises, government bureaux and so on) which could mirror the central idea of “from cradle to grave” welfare of the classic perception of the idealized Western welfare state’ (Walker and Wong, 2004). This reference to the earlier model of work-unit-based welfare (also sometimes called the ‘iron rice bowl’, Leung, 1994) reminds us that up until the late 1980s the Soviet Union (and its satellites) offered a similar challenge to comparative theorists (see for example Deacon, 1983), while at the time of writing only Cuba and North Korea remain as societies that may claim to follow a centrally planned economic model. An interesting challenge here for the Esping-Andersen approach is whether these cases represented extreme commodification or extreme decommodification: the former since the key link to welfare was with work, the latter because work-unit protection extended to families rather than individuals.
This leads us on to consideration of Russia and the former Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. With significant trends towards privatization, Russia may be seen as moving into the ‘liberal’ camp, while in Central and Eastern Europe there is a continuing struggle between both internal and external pressures to adopt the liberal model (sold forcefully by bodies like the World Bank, see Deacon, 1997) and the vestiges of pre-Soviet conservative models. Comparative study of social policy in countries in this region within the regime typology framework has increased considerably since the 1990s (see for example Pascall and Manning, 2000; Cerami, 2006), facilitated by their similarity in core features with the original OECD countries studied by Esping-Andersen.
Walker and Wong’s challenge reminds us, however, that the efforts to classify welfare regimes actually discounts much of the world, including Islamic Middle Eastern and North African countries, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and (to some extent) Latin America. Gough and Wood (and their associates) (2004) engaged in a bold attempt to deal with this problem in their exploration of ways to analyze welfare systems (including of course their absence) in the poorer countries of the world. They take as their starting point Esping-Andersen’s regime theory, noting that while the original concern was with explaining ‘welfare state regimes’, in Esping-Andersen’s later work (1999) this shifts into the simpler form of ‘welfare regimes’. They argue that Esping-Andersen is generalizing about societies with two crucial characteristics: the presence of predominantly capitalist employment and a democratic nation state. Hence the significance of the idea of the welfare state as a product of state intervention to secure a ‘truce’. Therefore, for Gough and Wood it is important to see welfare state regimes as one ‘family’ of welfare regimes in a world in which there are others, where those defining characteristics are not present. These others are identified as ‘informal security regimes’ in which families and communities may play key roles as providers of welfare, and ‘insecurity regimes’ in which even these do not provide effective welfare. Hence, regime theory is used by Gough and Wood and extended in important ways to contribute to the analysis of welfare worldwide (see also Sharkh and Gough, 2010, for their use of cluster analysis to extend this approach).
Important elements in Gough and Wood’s analysis of regimes include exploration of the implications of an absence of secure formal employment, of states that function ineffectively or even exploitatively, of weak or absent communities and even of families that do not protect their members. Attention is also given to various respects in which welfare outcomes depend heavily on actions outside the regimes – not just the impact of global capitalism and of aid via governments and non-governmental organizations, but also the extent to which welfare in many societies depends upon contributions from family members living and working elsewhere in the world.
As noted earlier, while countries in Latin America did not figure in early regime theory, as with post-Soviet Europe, there has been increasing interest in the welfare state characteristics of the richer