The East Asian welfare state debate and surrogate social policy: an exploratory study on Japan and South Korea

The welfare states in East Asia have been widely considered underdeveloped. Since the definition and measurements of social policy and the welfare state are subject to change depending on the specific historical, political and economic context, the welfare underdevelopment thesis deserves scrutiny. In Japan, Korea and Taiwan, agricultural protection and enterprise welfare, among others, have been surrogates of conventional welfare policies. As a way of critically engaging in the debate over the East Asian welfare model, this paper focuses on these two areas of surrogate social policy and explores their empirical basis with the OECD data on Japan and Korea. The result shows that surrogate social policy measures such as producer support estimates for agricultural protection and mandatory private social spending for enterprise welfare add up to make a difference between the East Asian countries and the other OECD members. This suggests a distinct political-economic model for East Asian social welfare.