SSR Seminar Series: East Asian Welfare Systems Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic

East Asian social welfare has been described as productivist, where social policies are subordinate to economic development. However, East Asian comparative studies often focus on a few select social policies and seldom examine welfare programs as a bundle. We contribute to the depiction of divergent features of East Asian safety nets by exploring the (1) welfare content (generosity, coverage, protective vs. productive, and work incentives), (2) welfare outcomes (poverty reduction and income redistribution), and (3) welfare responses to COVID-19 for lower-income populations in urban areas in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. We collected model family data for more than 2000 families and analysed the data through descriptive statistics and regression models. Our findings reveal heterogeneity within East Asian welfare systems, and our synthesis of welfare features using model family data offers a promising, innovative strategy for conducting comparative research in regions with limited comparable data.