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EAST ASIA, (EUROPE) AND LATIN AMERICA[1]
Peter Abrahamson
University of Copenhagen
This paper applies bot a regional and a comparative perspective on contemporary welfare state development. Taking off from comparative analyses of economic development and social rights in Europe, Central America and East Asia (Abrahamson 2010a, 2010b, forthcomng) this study seeks to understand welfare development through comparing developments between regions rather than within regions. The focus is in the first place on selected countries in East Asia and Latin America, and secondly, if time allows, on selected Central- Eastern and Southern European countries. It, thus, follows in the footsteps of those relatively few scholars that have gone beyond Eurocentric, or even Swedocentric, analyses such as Ian Gough (2006), G. Woods (2004), Armando Barrientos (2011), Stephen Haggard (2008) and Huk-ju Kwon (2010).
Developments within these three regions of the world have a number of things in common: late welfare state development; recent authoritarian political pasts; export substitution economic strategies and social insurance only for privileged segments of (public) employees. Their welfare states have within the welfare modeling business been considered to be under developed and productivist.
The paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate on welfare under globalization by moving focus from the North to the South and by viewing globalization as regionalization.