Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan: Party, Bureaucracy, and Business

ISBN-13: 9780521856935 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 360 str.

Massachusetts) Margarita Estevez-Abe (Harvard University

Opis

This book explains how postwar Japan managed to achieve a highly egalitarian form of capitalism despite meager social spending. Estevez-Abe develops an institutional, rational-choice model to solve this puzzle. She shows how Japan s electoral system generated incentives that led political actors to protect, if only for their own self-interested reasons, various groups that lost out in market competition. She explains how Japan s postwar welfare state relied upon various alternatives to orthodox social spending programs. The initial postwar success of Japan s political economy has given way to periods of crisis and reform. This book follows this story up to the present day. Estevez-Abe shows how the current electoral system renders obsolete the old form of social protection. She argues that institutionally Japan now resembles Britain and predicts that Japan s welfare system will also come to resemble Britain s. Japan thus faces a more market-oriented society and less equality."

Recenzje

“An amazing book. It offers an original characterization of the political economy of the Japanese welfare state, a detailed thematic story of social policy decision making over decades, and an audacious proposition that electoral systems explain (almost) everything. I have some quibbles with all three arguments and I certainly hope the prediction that the Japanese welfare state will soon look like the British welfare state will not come true, but I know that Japanologists and comparativists with any interest in social policy, economics, and politics will have to take this formidable book into account.”
-John Campbell, University of Michigan

Spis treści

1. Rashomon: the Japanese welfare state in a comparative perspective; 2. Structural logics of welfare politics; 3. Historical patterns of structural logic in postwar Japan; 4. The rise of the Japanese social protection system in the 1950s; 5. Economic growth and Japan's selective welfare expansion; 6. Institutional complemetarities and the Japanese welfare capitalism; 7. The emergence of trouble in the 1970s; n8. Policy shifts in the 1990s: the emergence of European-style welfare politics; 9. The end of Japan's social protection as we know it: becoming like Britain?