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Previous studies of East Asian welfare regimes focus on similarities between social security schemes. In contrast, this paper explores cross-national variations in public–private pension mixes in six welfare states: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Our research echoes the pension policy analysis of international organisations but takes a step forward with emphasis on the historical and institutional characteristics of the respective pension systems. The analysis identifies three institutional patterns. First, the statist pension system (Taiwan and China) primarily relies on public pensions to provide old-age security, with private pensions playing a rather minor role. Second, in the dualist pension system (Japan and Korea) both public and private pensions work in parallel to ensure retirement income, though a clear security gap exists between workers in the formal and informal economies. Finally, the individualist pension system (Hong Kong and Singapore) is characterised by genuine fully funded individual accounts, emphasising citizens' own responsibilities for ensuring old-age security. These three types of pension systems demonstrate distinct institutional characteristics and policy outcomes, illustrated by the juxtaposition of their institutional structures as well as by the comparison of key indicators collected from government reports and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection of East Asian pension policies and a diagnosis of the distinct challenges confronted by each of the various pension patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Rare diseases, also referred to as orphan diseases, are characterised by their low prevalence with majority of them are chronically debilitating and life threatening. Given the low prevalence and the widely dispersed but very small patient base for each disease, there may often be a disproportion in the availability of treatments and resources to manage patients, spur research and train experts. This is especially true in Southeast Asian countries that are currently in the process of implementing or revising their universal health coverage schemes. This paper aims to examine the status of rare disease management in Southeast Asian countries. It will serve as the basis for a more active discussion on how countries in the region can address an under-recognised rare disease burden and enhance national and regional capacities.Methods: The study consists of literature reviews and key stakeholders interviews in six focus countries, including the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand and five countries as best practice, comprising of France, Canada, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea. Rare disease management initiatives across each country were examined based on the World Health Organization's framework for action in strengthening health systems.Results: The results suggest rare disease management remains challenging across Southeast Asia, as many of the focus countries face fundamental issues from basic healthcare systems to funding. Nonetheless, there are substantial improvement opportunities, including leveraging best practices from around the world and organising a multi-stakeholder and regional approach and strategy.Conclusions: Southeast Asian countries have made significant progress in the management of rare disease, but there remain key areas for substantial development opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Provide a comprehensive overview of the solidarity in health and long-term care sectors. • The overall direction of reforms is developing toward universal coverage. • Reforms might be possible without overall consensus on solidarity. • The pay-as-you-go financial arrangements will require strong intergenerational solidarity. • The capacity of informal caregiving of family could be considered. Different from the development of health sector, there are significant variations in the underpinnings and formation timings of solidarity-based long-term care (LTC) systems. This paper compares the historical developmental trajectories and identifies factors of the transitions of the actual practices of solidarity - the scope of community, the scope of interdependence, and the costs of joint action - in the health and LTC sectors in four East Asian countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Comparative policy analysis. Healthcare tends to be considered a universal value such that its boundary should include all residents, while LTC is closer to an entitlement of citizens. The differing solidarity reflects path dependency as well as historical legacies and policy diffusion between the health and LTC sectors. In both health and LTC sectors, the costs involved in collective service provision are not distributed evenly between generations. Centralized governance is a prevailing feature of health and LTC sectors in East Asia, allowing solidarity-based institutional arrangements to be established without an overall sense of solidarity. The relationship between solidarity and health and LTC systems is complex and dynamic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper views seeking the optimal balance between state strengths and the scope of state functions for 'good governance' as the formation of a homogenization-heterogenization matrix of policy initiatives in different social settings. Homogenization refers to a global tendency for institutional changes and governance framework to change state capacity, while heterogenization refers to the local adaptation of these global transformations. The paper attempts to take educational decentralization as an example of policy initiatives to assess and analyse the significance of the two opposite poses in four East Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs) (Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, and Taiwan). The paper's position is that it may be useful to see these four NIEs as making up two clusters. It sees political democratic transitions in Korea and Taiwan as important local factors affecting the developments of educational decentralization in the two societies, while reforms in Hong Kong and Singapore seem to be more consequences of managerial and market values. However, the NIEs face the question of how to maintain sufficient 'stateness' in the decentralization process. To conclude, the paper considers that achieving the balance of 'stateness' is the key to success in state-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four Asian economies – Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and Taiwan – have grown at spectacular speeds adopting different strategies. Past debates focused on their growth takeoff. The present paper studies their future outlook. As an economy matures, sustaining economic performance requires innovation and technology upgrading. Hong Kong, under a minimalist administration, is now critically deficient in technology. Singapore, dependent on foreign multinationals, is struggling to become a creator and not just a user of technology. We seek to explain why Hong Kong and Singapore are so much less innovative than Korea and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]