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Understanding welfare changes in Japan and Korea: A régulationist interpretation
Sébastien Lechevalier (EHESS)

日時:2012年 10月9日 14時50分-16時30分
場所:センター会議室(赤門総合研究棟5F)

報告要旨

 Most of the analyzes of the East Asian capitalisms have emphasized the industrial organization and firm organization as the dominant characteristics from the viewpoint of institutional hierarchy and relations between employment and finance from the viewpoint of complementarities (Whitley, 1994; Orru et al., 1997; Amable, 2003; Carney et al., 2009). Whereas the development of welfare systems has been considered as a distinctive feature of some European capitalisms by opposition to the liberal form of capitalism, it is fair to say that the dominant understanding of Asian capitalisms is that they are at the opposite pole of what can be labeled “welfare capitalism”, as it appears in the result of the cluster analysis conducted by Amable (2003).

 In this presentation, which focuses on Japan and Korea, we argue that these previous analyses of Asian capitalisms have underestimated or ignored in-depth analyses of Asian capitalisms from the viewpoint of welfare (Campbell & Ikegami, 1997; Takegawa, 1999; Tachibanaki, 2000; 2005; Kasza, 2006, Estevez-Abe, 2008, among others), in adopting, at least implicitly, a perspective, inspired by the over-simplified typology of Esping Andersen, which can be qualified of “welfare orientalism” (Takegawa, 2005). These classical approaches of Asian capitalism, which focus on corporate systems, also faced some difficulties to explain the current transformation of East Asian capitalisms (Boyer et al., 2011). Moreover and even more importantly, we argue that welfare is at the core of the evolving forms of capitalism in these two countries. Our interpretation is that institutional change in Asian capitalism is driven by changes in the social compromise.

 These two economies are experiencing a series of changes that can be interpreted as the manifestations of internal contradictions, which require the development of new welfare systems to be overcome. Among these changes, this presentation focuses on the ones that affected such institutions as family and firms, as well as ageing, and rising inequalities.

 This presentation will be organized as follows. A first part will be dedicated to the presentation of our theoretical framework inspired by régulationist related work as well as by Bruno Théret's contribution. A second part will be dedicated to the discussion of stylized facts that have characterized the changes in welfare systems in Japan and Korea during the last 30 years. In a third part, we try to explain these changes before, in a fourth part, proposing a more general interpretation of institutional changes in these two forms of capitalism.


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