東アジア福祉システムの展望

論点の整理

抄録

As they entered the latter half of the 1990s, the governments of East Asian countries had ­simultaneously shifted their attention from economic development to social policy. Behind impressive changes in government policies, we can find three major elements: increasing public concerns over the quality of life (QOL) in the aftermath of the Cold War as well as the ­development of local democratization movements; the urgent need for governments to build nationwide social safety nets in order to help the people who were hit hard by the financial ­crisis in 1997; and serious demands for governments to tackle new problems caused by an ­increasingly aging populations.
These three elements combined together to force the governments of East Asia to launch ­notable reforms in their social security systems such as the introduction of national pension schemes and nationwide healthcare systems. At the same time, these movements have also caused policy-related debates on desirable welfare regimes among political parties, non-governmental organizations and academicians, as exemplified in the past decade by the ‘productive welfare state’ debate in South Korea, the ‘nationwide healthcare scheme’ debate in Taiwan, and the ‘people’s basic right’ debate in Thailand.
More interestingly, these movements also provided academic circles outside East Asia with strong incentives to clarify the peculiar characteristics of the welfare system of newly industrialized economies of Asia in comparison to the Western experience, and to develop the argument for new paradigm for an East Asian welfare model beyond the Western one. For instance, Holliday categorized the East Asian welfare system as a ‘productivist welfare system’ in association with the developmentalist state regime, while Jones described an ‘oikonomic welfare regime’ in reference to the Confucian cultural background. Regardless of the extent of their emphasis on the nature of state and culture, these arguments seem to share a common ­understanding on the ‘East Asian welfare model’ in two distinguished aspects of devoted family supports and company benefits system in large-sized firms.
According to such implementation, this paper primarily aims to explore the background of recent government social policies, and to examine a variety of arguments on the East Asian welfare models. After tracing and criticizing these arguments, the paper points out three movements taking place in the field of social security, including institutionalization, socialization, and commercialization. More specifically, we examine the increasing role of the government in designing the national welfare regime under the pressure of social change (institutionalization), diversification of agents in welfare services to non-public sector such as family, ­community and NPO/NGO due to the limitation of budget resources (socialization), and the emerging role of the private sector such as provident funds and life insurance companies to supplement limited services undertaken by the government as well as voluntary organizations.
The paper also attempts to introduce new major movements of regulating the direction of East Asian welfare regime in the near future. These movements include: the serious impact by the so-called ‘compressed population transition’ or the negative effect of a rapidly aging population and a decreasing economically active population upon economic growth; the urgent need to cope with the new type of ‘health transition’, including how to synchronize dealing with three different types of diseases (new infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, chronic diseases such as cancers and heart diseases, and degenerative illnesses); and the decreasing role of the occupational welfare or company benefits in social security due to the enhanced global com­petition in reducing production cost.
Finally, the paper points out the necessity of careful empirical study on the current situations facing East Asian