Measuring ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ Welfare development and the dependent variable problem within East Asian social policy analysis

Since the 1990s, there has been a surge in interest in the development of welfare policies across East Asian nations and territories. Critical questions for East Asian scholars have become what welfare policy areas to focus on and how to conceptualise and empirically measure East Asian welfare development in response to shared challenges, such as globalisation, ageing, and unpaid family caring responsibilities.

I argue that in order to address these questions what is needed is a way to address the so-called dependent variable problem within East Asian social policy analysis.

This article introduces the notion of the ‘dependent variable problem’ within social policy analysis (Part 1), presents empirical findings of selected social spending, social rights and social outcome indicators to demonstrate the extent to which it aggravates macro-level analyses of East Asian welfare development (Part 2), and makes several suggestions on how scholars can potentially address its main implications for East Asian social policy analysis (Part 3).