The limits of the productivist regime: capturing three decades of East Asian social policy development with fuzzy sets

Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the
‘limits of productivist regimes’ (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare.
Employing set-theoretic methods, this paper develops three distinct types of
East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, including education, health care, family policy, old age pensions, public housing, and passive LMP, in six East Asian societies, including China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. We find that all cases with the exception of Hong Kong and Singapore have experienced at least one radical shift in their welfare models over the past three decades (1990-2016). East Asian governments have increasingly combined quantitative expansion/retrenchment of ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policy structures but have done so in unique ways. South Korea has followed the most ‘balanced’ approach to welfare development and stands out as the best candidate for further type-specific expansions moving forward.