From development to welfare: The state and welfare capitalism in Japan and South Korea

This dissertation consists of two parts. Part One attempts to theorize the welfare state formation in advanced East Asian capitalist economies in the context of their economic development strategies. Export-oriented industrialization pioneered by Japan and followed by Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore set the parameters of the neomercantilist residual welfare state (NRWS)---low public social spending and heavy reliance on family and private occupational welfare. NRWS can be differentiated into two more concrete models: Japan, Korea, and Taiwan form a nation-state model around their historical ties and preference for social insurance; Hong Kong and Singapore form a city-state model with the common British colonial legacy.;While other approaches focus on the overarching reason for the general underdevelopment of public social welfare, I argue that the development strategy of NRWS bred "surrogate social policy" that has compensated for the lack of conventional welfare policies. In the nation-state model, agricultural protection and enterprise welfare have been were surrogate social policies. I focus on these two areas of surrogate social policy, exploring their empirical basis with OECD data on Japan and Korea. The result shows that such surrogate social policy measures as Producer Support Estimate for agricultural protection and mandatory private social spending for enterprise welfare, compensate for the shortage of public social spending in the East Asian NRWS compared to the other OECD countries.;In Part Two, I conduct a comparative historical survey of Japan and Korea from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. This survey shows that the basic welfare system in Japan was established before 1945, and that the role of social policy in the state-led modernization drive remained consistent though the pre- and postwar Japan. In Korea, the importation of Japanese model by the military rulers had prompted the formation of NRWS since the early 1960s. These findings challenges the common wisdom that the developmental states in both countries subscribed to the "growth-first" ideology that put economic development in the front and pushed social welfare to the back.