The Neomercantilist Residual Welfare States in East Asia: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

This paper attempts to theorize the welfare state formation in advanced East Asian capitalist economies in the context of economic development strategy. State-led, export-oriented industrialization pioneered by Japan and followed by the Four Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore set the basic parameters of the Neomercantilist Residual Welfare State (NRWS): low social spending and heavy reliance on family and enterprise welfare. While other theoretical approaches see a general 'underdevelopment' of social welfare in these economies, this paper argues that the NRWS employs 'surrogate social policies' that compensate for the lack of conventional welfare policies without proper noticed in the comparative welfare state literature. Among others, agricultural subsidies for small farmers and the statutory retirement payment for the working and middle classes in Japan, Korea and Taiwan can be considered as such.A major divergence within the East Asian NRWS stems from two factors. One is that Singapore and Hong Kong are small city-states without rural hinterlands; the other is colonial legacy in that the city-states inherited the British-introduced social welfare institutions while Japan, Korea and Taiwan developed the social insurance-based system through policy diffusion and importation. Therefore, the NRWS has two subsets, the city-state and the nation-state model. The NRWS was predicated upon the development strategy that enabled the East Asian 'economic miracle' in the late twentieth century. Recent changes in political economic environments, often summarized into globalization and democratization, have set off a complex process of global convergence/regional divergence of the welfare state in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]