Brotherhood of St Laurence special lunchtime seminar - Social and political economy of care in Japan and South Korea

Since the 1990s, both the Japanese and the Korean governments have made significant attempts to flexibilize their labour market through employment deregulation, on the one hand, and on the other, to expand social welfare, particularly in the form of social care. This is interesting and surprising. For one thing, these policy reforms are a qualitative shift away from these countries’ historical policy trajectories. For another, the combination of social and economic policy reforms is somewhat contradictory, as neoliberal market policies do not usually go hand in hand with social welfare expansion. Why and how did the Japanese and Korean governments come up with such a curious mix of policy reforms, and what do they mean? In this presentation, I show how the combination of demographic shifts, changes in family relations and women’s employment patterns, increased global economic competition and in the case of Korea, the 1997 Asian economic crisis and the subsequent push towards neoliberal market reforms, have culminated in a serious rethinking of social policy in these countries.

Ito Peng is Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary and International Affairs and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toronto. She teaches political sociology, comparative welfare states, and public policy, specializing in family, gender, and labour market policies. Her current research includes political and social economy of care; social investment policies in Canada, Australia, Japan, and South Korea; and international comparative research on labour market dualization. Dr. Peng is also an associate researcher for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). She received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics.