Welfare Regimes in China and Vietnam

Abstract

This essay examines the evolution of welfare regimes in contemporary China and Viet Nam. Specifically, it examines how the degeneration of state-socialist regimes and the evolution of new political economies in their wake have shaped institutional arrangements governing the provision and payment for education and health services and their stratification effects. A foundational assumption of welfare regimes analysis is that welfare institutions evolve interdependently with prevailing political and economic institutions. That is, historically emergent combinations of political and economic institutions that define a given political economy – and express the precise relation between state and economy – profoundly affect welfare and stratification. Analysing welfare regimes in China and Viet Nam raises interesting questions about the nature and dynamics of their political economies and more general questions about how welfare regimes evolve in the transition from one form of political economy to another. This essay argues that welfare regimes and stratification in contemporary China and Viet Nam may not be understood without appreciating their properties under state-socialism and how specific paths of extrication affected their degeneration and subsequent development under a new form of political economy.