Social Protection in East Asian Chinese Societies : Challenges, Responses and Impacts

Despite its impressive economic growth, East Asia is facing daunting challenges in mitigating its social problems, including chronic poverty and worsening social inequality. The past decade has seen growing scholarly interest in the development of East Asian social policies not only because of the sheer size of the population and its global impact, but also due to the stark contrast between this region’s economic prosperity and the ongoing issue of severe social inequality. This book presents a collection of studies on aspects of social protection in East Asian Chinese societies, including Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Contributions by leading social policy scholars working in and on the region aim to promote scholarly understanding of the pressures facing social protection systems in East Asia, identify existing gaps and emerging social policy issues and review the effectiveness of existing programmes. The evidence presented and insights generated will promote further debate and facilitate meaningful comparative social policy studies in the region and beyond. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy.

Peter Saunders is one of Australia’s foremost experts on poverty, social inequality and social security and has published extensively on these topics nationally and internationally. He is currently the President of the Foundation for International Studies on Social Security and in 2015-2016 was a member of the World Bank Commission on Global Poverty.

Alex Jingwei He is Associate Head and Associate Professor of the Department of Asian and Policy Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. He specializes in health policy and governance and social policy reforms with a particular focus on East Asian Chinese societies.