Ka Ho Mok - Managing Welfare Expectations and Social Change: Policy Transfer in Asia

Much has been written about the challenges Asian governments face in regards to growing welfare expectations and social change. High-income cases across Asia have been characterized as having to deal with external and internal pressures not unlike the ones experienced in OECD/EU countries (Taylor-Gooby 2009, Hemerjick 2013). At the economic level, globalization and technological change have increasingly led to the creation of new social risks and due to ensuing transitions in national production processes and labour markets growing inequality and uncertainty (Hwang 2011, Izuhara 2013, Mok 2017). At the social level, changes in family structures and family life have in conjunction with persistent gender inequality contributed to low fertility rates and ageing populations putting significant pressures on social budgets particularly pensions, health and social care (Kim and Choi 2013, Sung and Pascall 2014; Ku 2016). New evidence suggests that governments in Greater China and East Asia face growing welfare expectations that go beyond the human capital-focused, family-oriented and work-centred approaches that have driven the welfare discourse after the 1997 and 2008 financial crises (Mok and Lau 2014, Ngok and Chan 2016). As for other Asian countries, debates have centred on concerns that recent socio-economic transitions threaten to trap them in low- or middle-income status as large productivity gaps, imbalances in the key sources of economic growth, but also rising inequality, wage demands as well as environmental constraints continue to affect public and social policy making in the region (Surender and Walker 2013, Devine