Social Protection Goals In East Asia

The book examines the conceptual, economic, and fiscal impact(s) of the Social Protection Floor (SPF) initiative of the International Labor Organisation (ILO) and other policy influencers by first critically examining the methodologies used by the international agencies to estimate the fiscal costs of designated minimum package(s) of social protection programs. The book also briefly reviews the methodologies used and usefulness of the Social Protection Index (SPI) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Second, the book analyses strategies and specific initiatives used by the selected East Asian countries (China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam), designed to progress towards the social protection goals underlying the Social Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in September 2015, and endorsed by the countries covered in this book. Finally, the book provides a framework for generating fiscal space to fund the social protection programs and initiatives. The country chapters utilise this framework in the context of each specific country to suggest generating fiscal space.

This book focuses on relatively unexplored areas in pension and health care arrangements, including financing, in East Asia. The book aims to fill the literature gap on social protection in East Asia by covering issues such as pension and health care arrangements in the depopulating high income countries of Japan and Korea; the challenges of the pay-out phase in Defined Contribution (DC) arrangements in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore; and the extension of coverage of social protection schemes in China, India, and Indonesia. It also reviews social protection from a much wider perspective and extends coverage of social protection in terms of both the proportion of the population with access to the social protection scheme and the types of risks faced by the households and by society as a whole. The book also gives attention to reforms of civil service pensions.

Despite its impressive economic growth, East Asia is facing daunting challenges in mitigating its social problems, including chronic poverty and worsening social inequality. The past decade has seen growing scholarly interest in the development of East Asian social policies not only because of the sheer size of the population and its global impact, but also due to the stark contrast between this region’s economic prosperity and the ongoing issue of severe social inequality. This book presents a collection of studies on aspects of social protection in East Asian Chinese societies, including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Contributions by leading social policy scholars working in and on the region aim to promote scholarly understanding of the pressures facing social protection systems in East Asia, identify existing gaps and emerging social policy issues and review the effectiveness of existing programmes. The evidence presented and insights generated will promote further debate and facilitate meaningful comparative social policy studies in the region and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

Comparative social policy has long neglected welfare development in Asia. Not much is known about social welfare in the economically successful East Asian tigers (Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan). They are late starters in social welfare but each has its own trajectory of welfare development. Despite the presence of extensive social welfare, they have shied away from western-style welfare states. The presence of strong developmental states and their development ethos explain in large part the underdevelopment of state welfare.

This book looks at the role of social policy and particularly social security in addressing the ongoing challenge of poverty in East Asia despite the region’s spectacular experience of economic growth in decent decades. The East Asian miracle resulted over the last four decades in a transformation of the region’s traditional agrarian economies and significant increases in standards of living for many ordinary people. Even though it was given little attention, poverty has remained an ongoing problem. The problem became particularly evident however with the Asian financial crisis of 1997 when many low income and middle class workers became unemployed. As a result of this crisis, the need for effective social policies and social security programs were recognized. The idea that economic growth would solve the problem of poverty was increasingly challenged. Even in China today, where rapid growth has created new employment opportunities and the promise of prosperity for many, the government has recognized that the problem of poverty cannot be addressed only through economic growth but that comprehensive social policies must be formulated, and this includes the development of an effective security system.

In many Western countries, social welfare payments are increasingly being made conditional on recipients doing voluntary work or attending job training courses, a system known as "welfare-to-work" or "workfare". Although social welfare in Asia is very different to the West, with much smaller social welfare budgets, a strong self-reliance and a much higher dependency on family networks to provide support, the workfare approach is also being adopted in many Asian countries. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of how welfare reform around work is implemented in leading East Asian. Based on the experiences of seven East Asian economies - including China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau - this book critically analyses current trends; the social, economic and political factors which lead to the implementation of workfare; compares the similarities and differences of workfare in the different polities and assesses their effectiveness.

Dramatic socio-economic transformations over the last two decades have brought social policy and social welfare issues to prominence in many East Asian societies. Since the 1990s and in response to national as well as global pressure, there have been substantial developments and reforms in social policy in the region but the development paths have been uneven. Until recently, comparative analysis of East Asian social policy tends to have focused on the established welfare state of Japan and the emerging welfare regimes of four Tiger Economies. Much of the recent debate indeed preceded Chinas re-emergence onto the world economy. In this context, this Handbook brings China more fully into the contemporary social policy debates in East Asia. Organised around five themes from welfare state developments, to theories and methodologies, to current social policy issues, the Handbook presents original research from leading specialists in the fields, and provides a fresh and updated perspective to the study of social policy. Providing a comparative international approach, this Handbook will appeal to academics, researchers and students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels working in the fields of social policy, as well as policy makers and practitioners who are interested in social policy lessons from other societies.