Conclusion : analyzing the productivist dimensions of welfare : looking beyond the Greater China region

Following the publication of Esping-Andersen's (1990) classic The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the comparative social policy literature has been dominated by the welfare state modelling debate. One of the thorniest questions here has been how best to classify Hast Asian states (an early criticism of Esping- Andersen's work was that it had misunderstood and so misclassified Japan, the only East Asian nation included in his typology - see Esping-Andersen, 1997) but as the welfare regimes debate has expanded to encompass a much wider geographic area the debate has become more complex still, with a wide range of rival typologies having developed (Abrahamson, 1999, 2011) and debates continued over the most appropriate indicators (Clasen and Sigel, 2007; Kühner, 2007) and methods (Hudson and Kühner, 2010) for welfare regime analysis. While Esping-Andersen (1999) acknowledges that all classifications rely on simplified ideal types that cannot fully capture the complex reality of actual welfare regimes, some have questioned their utility even as a broad heuristic device (Baldwin, 1996). The present chapter critically examines the productivist dimensions of welfare beyond the experience in the Greater China region by looking into other European countries' welfare development.