Welfare Reform in East Asia

<p>In many Western countries social welfare payments are increasingly being made conditional on recipients doing voluntary work or attending job training courses a system known as welfare-to-work or workfare. Although social welfare in Asia is very different to the West with much smaller social welfare budgets a strong self-reliance and a much higher dependency on family networks to provide support the workfare approach is also being adopted in many Asian countries. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of how welfare reform around work is implemented in leading East Asian.</p><p>Based on the experiences of seven East Asian economies - including China Japan South Korea Taiwan Singapore Hong Kong and Macau - this book critically analyses current trends; the social economic and political factors which lead to the implementation of workfare; compares the similarities and differences of workfare in the different polities and assesses their effectiveness.</p>