Deconstructing the Asian welfare model: social equality matters

Abstract

Esping-Andersen's seminal work on welfare regimes in capitalist societies sparked a heated debate regarding the Asian welfare model. In the past decade, the controversy has centred on verifying or disproving the existence of such a model and, for those who confirm its existence, identifying its characteristics. There are two ways of describing the Asian welfare model: the cultural approach, which emphasizes the role played by Confucian teaching in resisting the establishment of a strong welfare system; and the political–economic approach, which emphasizes the productivist ideology that characterizes the economic and welfare systems of Asian countries. These approaches have evolved into discourses that are used to determine the existence and the ‘success’ of the Asian welfare regime. This paper proposes a re-evaluation of these discourses, which tend to neglect the social inequalities, risks, and problems that characterize Asian welfare regimes. This paper challenges the domination of the ‘productivist ethos’ and the economy-led social policy in Asian welfare regimes, and calls attention to the need for social policy studies that analyse social inequalities based on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age.