Institutional Linkages between Social Protection Measures and Industrialization in South Korea

Jooha Lee

Chapter 5 in Learning from the South Korean Developmental Success, 2014, pp 91-107 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract There has been a long-standing controversial debate as to whether the welfare state is compatible with a market-based economy. At the end of the twentieth century, the Left and the Right shared a broadly based consensus that the state provision of welfare was compatible with a developed capitalist economy (Pierson 1998). However, the New Right’s onslaught to the Keynesian welfare state revitalized the incompatibility proposition. Globalization, specifically its predominant neoliberal version, can be said to make social policy explicitly subservient to the interest of the economy, which can be seen as another form of the trade-off between economic growth (or competitiveness) and social welfare. In contrast with the inexorable logic of globalization conjured up by neoliberalism, however, the impact of social policy on cornpetitiveness can have positive or compatibility effects in many aspects: macroeconomic stabilization effects, human capital improvement via education and training, and enhanced flexibility via greater trust and reduced transaction costs, for example (Gough 1996). After reviewing several econometric studies, Atkinson (1999: 84) concluded that ‘studies of the aggregate relationship between economic performance and the size of the welfare state do not yield conclusive evidence’. The crux of the matter for a feasible welfare state in the epoch of globalization is how to combine economic efficiency with equity and distributive justice (for example, Goodin et al. 1999: 259–62).

Keywords: Gross Domestic Product; Cash Transfer; Social Investment; Active Labor Market Policy; Institutional Linkage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:sopchp:978-1-137-33948-5_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781137339485

DOI: 10.1057/9781137339485_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Social Policy in a Development Context from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().