with the new global debate about the economic costs of generous welfare benefit systems but have drawn their own conclusions on the value of social spending.
There is another kind of contribution to the debate about East Asia which goes further than questions about whether nations can be slotted into Esping-Andersen’s regime typology or whether there are other types of regime. This is an argument that the whole regime approach embodies ‘Western’ ethnocentric assumptions about the role of the state and about welfare development as a product of the ‘truce’ between capital and labour (see Walker and Wong, 2004). The early comparative analyses of East Asia, while elaborate, were focused on a number of (relatively) small East Asian states with little attention to China. More recently, and particularly since the 2008 crisis, interest in the development in social policy in China is increasing (Cook and Lam, 2011) as its global influence has transformed. In their earlier analysis, Walker and Wong (2004, p. 124) observed that China had not been considered a ‘welfare state’ because it
lacks a Western-style political democracy and is not a fully capitalist economy. In spite of these two institutional ‘anomalies’ from the perspective of the Western construction, it had managed and is still able to provide sufficient social protection to its urban population, albeit with enormous difficulties at the present moment.
They note that ‘a poverty line, with its accompanying benefit provisions, was first promulgated in 1993 in Shanghai and now covers all urban areas’, and contrast this with their previous analysis of provision in the pre-reform era (prior to 1978) when ‘comprehensive welfare was provided through the “work-units” (that is, state-owned enterprises, government bureaux and so on) which could mirror the central idea of “from cradle to grave” welfare of the classic perception of the idealized Western welfare state’ (Walker and Wong, 2004). This reference to the earlier model of work-unit-based welfare (also sometimes called the ‘iron rice bowl’, Leung, 1994) reminds us that up until the late 1980s the Soviet Union (and its satellites) offered a similar challenge to comparative theorists (see for example Deacon, 1983), while at the time of writing only Cuba and North Korea remain as societies that may claim to follow a centrally planned economic model. An interesting challenge here for the Esping-Andersen approach is whether these cases represented extreme commodification or extreme decommodification: the former since the key link to welfare was with work, the latter because work-unit protection extended to families rather than individuals.
This leads us on to consideration of Russia and the former Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. With significant trends towards privatization, Russia may be seen as moving into the ‘liberal’ camp, while in Central and Eastern Europe there is a continuing struggle between both internal and external pressures to adopt the liberal model (sold forcefully by bodies like the World Bank, see Deacon, 1997) and the vestiges of pre-Soviet conservative models. Comparative study of social policy in countries in this region within the regime typology framework has increased considerably since the 1990s (see for example Pascall and Manning, 2000; Cerami, 2006), facilitated by their similarity in core features with the original OECD countries studied by Esping-Andersen.
Walker and Wong’s challenge reminds us, however, that the efforts to classify welfare regimes actually discounts much of the world, including Islamic Middle Eastern and North African countries, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and (to some extent) Latin America. Gough and Wood (and their associates) (2004) engaged in a bold attempt to deal with this problem in their exploration of ways to analyze welfare systems (including of course their absence) in the poorer countries of the world. They take as their starting point Esping-Andersen’s regime theory, noting that while the original concern was with explaining ‘welfare state regimes’, in Esping-Andersen’s later work (1999) this shifts into the simpler form of ‘welfare regimes’. They argue that Esping-Andersen is generalizing about societies with two crucial characteristics: the presence of predominantly capitalist employment and a democratic nation state. Hence the significance of the idea of the welfare state as a product of state intervention to secure a ‘truce’. Therefore, for Gough and Wood it is important to see welfare state regimes as one ‘family’ of welfare regimes in a world in which there are others, where those defining characteristics are not present. These others are identified as ‘informal security regimes’ in which families and communities may play key roles as providers of welfare, and ‘insecurity regimes’ in which even these do not provide effective welfare. Hence, regime theory is used by Gough and Wood and extended in important ways to contribute to the analysis of welfare worldwide (see also Sharkh and Gough, 2010, for their use of cluster analysis to extend this approach).
Important elements in Gough and Wood’s analysis of regimes include exploration of the implications of an absence of secure formal employment, of states that function ineffectively or even exploitatively, of weak or absent communities and even of families that do not protect their members. Attention is also given to various respects in which welfare outcomes depend heavily on actions outside the regimes – not just the impact of global capitalism and of aid via governments and non-governmental organizations, but also the extent to which welfare in many societies depends upon contributions from family members living and working elsewhere in the world.
As noted earlier, while countries in Latin America did not figure in early regime theory, as with post-Soviet Europe, there has been increasing interest in the welfare state characteristics of the richer Latin American countries in particular. Barrientos’ contribution to Gough and Wood’s book explores the way in which Latin American regimes have shifted from being rudimentary conservative ones (within the Esping-Andersen ‘family’ of regimes) to liberal ones. Among these countries it is possible to see choices being made between these options, most notably in Chile, which has had a special role in shaping the global pensions debate. Chile has experienced oscillations in this respect, with the period of Pinochet’s dictatorship enabling North American neoliberal economists to make the country a testing ground for free market theories. The important point in considering both Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, is the extent to which it is possible to talk of states making choices between regime models. These choices are not ‘free’ in the sense that they are constrained by countries’ positions in relation to parameters of global politics and global markets. The contemporary evolution of welfare states illustrates clearly the problems of using regime theory linked to the development of mature welfare states to predict current policy decisions (see Chapter 4 for further discussion).
In recognition of this problem, Gough and Wood’s (2004) work offers suggestions on how regime theory may be extended, and their concerns with the interconnectedness of systems, both through multi-national economic activities and with flows of remittances and international aid. They thus offer a new perspective on comparative analysis and tools for those who want to pursue these lines of enquiry. Yet still, their analysis does not extend to China or India or most of the Islamic world. All the analysis in this section leaves no unequivocal case for a new regime type outside the Esping-Andersen model, despite a more widely argued additional world embracing Southern Europe with perhaps parts of South East Asia and Latin America. Beyond this it may be questioned whether other efforts to stretch the use of regime modelling go too far, merely noting vestiges of the welfare approaches characteristic of Western Europe, or simply their absence.
While the roots of regime theory lie in a concern to delineate differences in the politics of welfare, modern usages focus much more on the extent to which it is possible to characterize as opposed to explain social policy systems, with the implication that the issues about explanatory power are now more concerned with explaining responses to new developments rather than origins. The original concern with the politics of welfare remains significant nevertheless. The extent to which particular welfare arrangements have political support from coalitions that protect them has been explored (Pierson, 1994, 2001) and related approaches that stress the importance of institutional pathways, in shaping change where welfare states have come under attack
