In the 2000s, at least two perspectives towards social policies in East Asian countries began to interweave and articulate themselves. One perspective is from comparative social policy or political economy, which originated in the West but began to include some East Asian countries in the 1990s, while another is from development studies, which have been paying greater attention to social policies in a developmental context, with a focus on East and Southeast Asian countries. Against this backdrop the current paper first tries to overview different but partly overlapping concepts of social policy in various perspectives. It suggests that much is expected of chronological as well as cross-sectional comparative studies of social policies, in order to cover policy measures other than social insurance schemes or their alternative modes of social protection on the one hand, and stages of development preceding industrialization and democratization on the other hand. Secondly by introducing a conceptual framework of "livelihood security system", this paper highlights a characteristic of 20^<th> century welfare states, in which the inherently individualistic and multi-dimensional risks of livelihood were reduced to the single-dimensional insufficiency of the income of male breadwinner, and explained away as employed or not employed in terms of main causes of risk. Of course, welfare states in the 20^<th> century did not share a similar structure, and the livelihood security systems of "advanced" nations around the 1980s can be grouped into three main categories: the "male breadwinner" model, the "work/life balance" model and the "market-oriented" model. It is argued that 20th century welfare state dysfunction has revealed itself as "social exclusion" in a broader sense, particularly in the male breadwinner model, designated as "the clearest case of impasse" in adapting to post-industrialization. Youth and women are excluded both within and outside the labor market, and exclusion is widely used by employers to avoid the burden of social insurance premiums. In Japan, where the male breadwinner orientation of the livelihood security system at the turn of the century is stronger than in other countries, social exclusion as accelerated "extra-legality" in social insurance schemes is evident. It needs to be contrasted to recent social security reforms in Korea and Taiwan that moved towards universalization of social insurance schemes in their efforts to restructure their strategies of economic development from labor- to capital- and skill-intensive.
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