Policy Analyses
Efforts & Outcomes of the Welfare State - Welfare Spending, Redistribution, and Quality of Society
- Author
Yeo, Eugene
- Publication Date
2017
- Pages
- Series No.
- Language
The welfare state is a form of political community that protects citizens’ right to social security, honoring civil rights and solidarity as principal political values. Raising the question of what is at the core of the welfare state, Uusitalo (1984) finds the answer in the welfare efforts and outcomes based on his comparative analysis of such states. Welfare efforts can be measured in terms of the scope and maturity of social security laws and public social spending, while welfare outcomes can be measured in terms of income inequality, the extent of Redistribution, social mobility, and opportunities for education. This study compares various welfare states along these two dimensions―efforts and outcomes―with a view to finding policy implications for the welfare state in South Korea. To this end, the author compares the trends and current levels of welfare efforts by the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in terms of
public social spending, and examines the composition of such. This study is an updated and revised version of Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of Designing a Korean Welfare State Model: A Comparison of Welfare Regimes, published by KIHASA in 2016. See the original study for detailed discussions of the datasets and methods of analysis used. This study shows that, contrary to popular belief, the
public social spending of these countries continued to rise even after the 1980s, ’Golden Age of welfare state’. Social democratic states continued to increase their public social spending well into the 1990s, and the relative latecomers to the welfare state in southern Europe and East Asia did likewise until 2010 or so. The total amounts that these states have spent on public social services, however, are insufficient sources of information on the changing dynamics and structures of such spending programs. While qualitative studies are needed to examine these changes in detail, an exploration of the changing composition of public social spending could reveal at least an outline of those changes. Next, this study reviews the distributive outcomes and quality of societies in these welfare states as reflecting the effects of their welfare policies, institutions, tax policies and spending programs. Welfare states levy taxes and distribute tax revenue toward improving the welfare of individuals, households, and society, thereby correcting extreme inequalities that can result from markets left completely free. Inequality among citizens can take the form of extreme material poverty, and also express itself in gross disparities in quality of life and the quality of society as a whole. This study examines the effects of different welfare regimes on reducing poverty and inequality, and applies the OECD’s Better Life Index (BLI), a multifaceted inⅠ. This study adds the Southern European and East Asian types to Gosta Esping-Andersen’s initial typology of liberal, conservative, and social democratic welfare states (1990). The social democratic welfare states(Nordic) include Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden; the conservative welfare states
(Continental), Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; the liberal welfare states (Anglo-Saxon), Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the Southern European states(Mediterranean Rim), Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; and the East Asian states, South Korea and Japan. In independent discussions on Korea, however, Japan is placed together with the conservative welfare states.
