The nature of welfare state regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This paper engages with two aspects of this debate; the gender critique of Esping-Andersen's thesis, and Kasza's (2002) assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare state regimes. It presents a gender-focused defamilisation index and contrasts it with Esping-Andersen's decommodification index to illustrate that, whilst individual welfare states have been shown to exhibit internal variety across different policy areas, they are both consistent and coherent in terms of their policy variation by gender. It concludes, in contrast to both the gender critique of Esping-Andersen, and Kasza's rejection of the regimes concept, that the ‘worlds of welfare’ approach is therefore neither gender blind or illusory, and can, if limited to the analysis of specific areas such as labour market decommodification or defamilisation, be resurrected as a useful means of organising and classifying welfare states.

The purpose of this article is to contrast productivism with post-productivism and raise a question mark over the extent to which social democrats should support the former rather than the latter. It offers a definition of post-productivism, explaining this in terms of the ‘reproductive value’ of care and sustainability. The paper then sketches the limits to social democracy and indicates why post-productivist solutions might therefore be appropriate. It concludes by speculating on some implications for social policy.

In recent years, there has been increasing focus on the question of how to balance work and life commitments in both academic and political debates. Homeworking is one initiative that has been promoted as a way of improving the work–life balance. This paper examines the experience of homeworking drawing on a recently completed ESRC study on homeworkers. Using the data from 45 interviews and 3 focus groups with homeworkers from different socio-economic backgrounds, it explores the question of whether working (or not) from home improves people's capacity to balance their work and life commitments.

This article discusses New Zealand's experiences with health care rationing policy. It reviews attempts to define ‘core services’, the development of prioritisation techniques for service access and funding, new technology assessment, and the management of subsidised pharmaceuticals. The New Zealand experience offers various lessons: that rationing policy development is, by nature, a ‘messy’ process; that central coordination of rationing policy is crucial unless differentiation in regional initiatives and service access are desired; and that through ongoing highlighting of the need for it, rationing policy development is likely to become an accepted reality.

This article presents a case study of income redistribution in South Korea. By analysing the most comprehensive household income survey (National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure), it identifies a growing sign of change regarding the extent to which social security is beginning to play an important role in reducing income inequality. Nonetheless, it argues that its impact is yet to be sizeable enough to make a significant difference and, still further, that social security is of little use in terms of mitigating increasing inequality of original incomes which comprise the largest part of gross income.

The latest period of expansion in the international economy has been characterised by the liberalisation of capital movements, the deregulation of major financial markets and the spread of neo-liberal beliefs in the merits of open and competitive trade, the disadvantages of big government and protectionist policies (Hirst, 1997). The rapid advancement of information and communication technology and the growth of knowledge-based economy have led to the gradual replacement of the conventional resource-based economies. ‘A techno-economic paradigm of information and communications technology and the knowledge-based economy has created a new knowledge-elite class that favours free markets in this post-industrial society, characterized by globalization, decentralization, deregulation and privatization’ (Low, 2003: 30–31).

The article will examine the latest development of China's urban social assistance reform. Under the impact of the dual processes of globalisation and the deepening market transition, China's social security reform is increasingly taking a new safety net approach to assist the urban poor, instead of relying mainly on social insurance provision. The minimum living security project for urban residents is one of the approaches supplementing social insurance in social protection. In 2002, about one-third of social security beneficiaries were supported by the newly developed social assistance project. The changing approach does not mean that the government is withdrawing from its responsibility for social insurance to the urban workers, but reflects the changing goals and means of social policies. This indicates that China's social welfare system is shifting towards a new residual welfare model.

Hong Kong has a liberal economy, and its welfare regime relies, first, on income through employment and, second, on support provided by family and community members. Although the government has strategically invested in certain social services, generally speaking, its aid is intended to be a secondary, if not the last resort. This system was effective when Hong Kong benefited from globalisation, enjoyed virtually full employment in the decades preceding the mid-1990s. However, the changes in capital flow and increasing capital relocation to Mainland China have had a negative impact on employment. As a result, the current welfare regime is unsustainable. The neo-liberal ideologies adopted by the government have only led to further social polarisation and instability. It is time for an approach that combines balanced development with broader social support.

The crisis and dissonance in a society under globalisation tend to be associated with suspicion against the welfare state. This article however attempts to argue for the crucial role of the welfare state in the formation of the politics of welfare that shapes a basic framework for a policy response to changes in the welfare society. The discussion sets out by illustrating the impacts of globalisation in contemporary Japan with special reference to the change in family and working practices. It goes on to analyse the current policy debates regarding socialisation of care in which ideological conflicts are manifested. Despite growing vulnerability of the family in Japan's ageing society, informal care-giving work tends to be undervalued and the stigma attached to the welfare state regarding elderly care and public assistance is persistent. It will be discussed how the long-run welfare reforms, as efforts of policy change, can be made sense of in Japan for escaping from a vicious circle of crisis and dissonance.

This paper explicates the welfare reforms executed in Korea after the abrupt financial meltdown in November 1997, and asks whether the same line of reforms will continue further into the twenty-first century Korea. The DJ government's post-crisis policy choice was to persue an expansion and consolidation of the social welfare system based upon the principle of solidarity. Consequently, the size of social welfare expenditure grew fast between 1996 and 1999. Korean experience of post-crisis years demonstrates the case in which the global integration of economy brought about the fast expansion of social welfare programs. The ultimate question is will this growth continue in the sea of neo-liberal challenges, with the new government's ‘Participatory Welfare’ whose complete design is not made public yet.

Singapore's Central Provident Fund (CPF) has served well in the old economy as a macroeconomic stabilisation policy. It finessed the developmental state and created socio-political stability with home ownership extended to health, education and asset enhancement schemes. However, structural changes with globalisation, information communication technology (ICT) and the new knowledge-based economy (KBE), plus a series of crises and downturns since the Asian crisis have undermined full employment as the lynchpin of the triangulation and CPF model. Announcements made in August 2003 are germane to this paper's discussion of the reinvention of the CPF model. Profound and creative reinvention to balance between neo-liberal market-based solutions without losing the socio-political control enjoyed by the ruling regime, however, remains a political choice as in delinking the CPF–fiscal process, CPF serves members or state.

Globalisation, and its possible impacts, has been widely discussed and debated in Taiwan. The economic technocracies argue for globalisation, as a triumph of the free market and minimum state intervention, through measures of tax cuts, privatisation, deregulation, and so forth, as required to secure Taiwan's economic development in the future. However, rising unemployment accompanied by the new poverty requires more state provisions of social welfare. A strange policy orientation mixing tax cuts with welfare increases is proposed that precisely demonstrates the dilemma of the state between global competition and social reform. This is now a great challenge for Taiwan to balance economic and social requirements.

I started this paper with the objective of reviewing the literature on globalisation and welfare state in East Asia but quickly found that there was little available to review. Not only are there few published works on the topic, they are often too general or abstract to enlighten the subject. I accordingly redefined the paper's objective as reviewing the arguments on globalisation's impact on the Western welfare state and relating them to social welfare in East Asia. I will argue that globalisation's impact on social welfare in East Asia is even more multi-faceted and divergent than is the case in the Western world, due to domestic political conditions specific to the region.

Those who would like to explore more on the issue, apart from looking at the references of each article, can find more information and analysis from these items supplied by authors of the articles, which are arranged by four parts: general, general-Asia, country-specific and statistics.