Sase

We are delighted to announce that Pil Ho Kim has won the fourth annual prize for the best submitted article published in the previous year: "The East Asian Welfare State Debate and Surrogate Social Policy: An Exploratory Study on Japan and South Korea" (SER vol. 8, no.3). Pil will be honored at the awards ceremony on Friday evening.

Abstract

The welfare states in East Asia have been widely considered underdeveloped. Since the definition and measurements of social policy and the welfare state are subject to change depending on the specific historical, political and economic context, the welfare underdevelopment thesis deserves scrutiny. In Japan, Korea and Taiwan, agricultural protection and enterprise welfare, among others, have been surrogates of conventional welfare policies. As a way of critically engaging in the debate over the East Asian welfare model, this paper focuses on these two areas of surrogate social policy and explores their empirical basis with the OECD data on Japan and Korea. The result shows that surrogate social policy measures such as producer support estimates for agricultural protection and mandatory private social spending for enterprise welfare add up to make a difference between the East Asian countries and the other OECD members. This suggests a distinct political-economic model for East Asian social welfare.

Bio

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Pil Ho Kim earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in sociology at Seoul National University, after which he went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA for his doctorate in sociology. The article published in Socio-Economic Review comes from his dissertation on East Asian welfare state discourse, focusing on Japan and South Korea. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the subsequent expansive welfare reform in Korea prompted him to rethink certain common assumptions in East Asian capitalist development, such as 'growth with equity' or 'welfare underdevelopment.' Kim says, "I hope that my research makes some contribution to bridging the gap between the economic development literature and the welfare state literature."

In Seoul, Pil Ho Kim is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Development and Humans Security, Ewha Womans University. His current research project concerns the Korean government's attempt to export its 'economic development model' through foreign aid and knowledge-sharing programs provided for developing countries in Asia and Africa. His hobbies are academic and journalistic writing on Korean popular culture, pop music in particular, and tinkering with outdated personal computers and other electronic gadgets for fun.

About Socio-Economic Review

Socio-Economic Review (SER) is the official journal of SASE. It is part of a broader movement in the social sciences that returns to the economy's socio-political foundations. Devoted to advancing socio-economics, SER deals with the analytical, political and moral questions arising at the intersection of economy and society. Articles in SER explore how the economy is or should be governed by social relations, institutional rules, political decisions, and cultural values. SER considers the different ways in which the economy affects society, such as by breaking up old institutional forms and giving rise to new ones. The scope of the journal is deliberately broad, and thus opens the debate to new variations on its general theme. Its editorial structure allows editors to engage intellectually with authors and their submissions.

To find out more about SER, including detailed information on how to submit a paper, please consult the website: http://ser.oxfordjournals.org