Industrialization and Welfare: The Case of the Four Little Tigers

Abstract

Established theories of welfare and industrialization have been abstracted from the historical experience of the Western countries and no attempt has been made to assess their empirical validity with reference to the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of the Third World. Reviewing the industrial development and social services of Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan (the four little tigers) it is argued that social policy development in these countries cannot be attributed to the effects of the conditions of industrialization in which political elites respond proactively to the demands of industrial change. Instead, social policy in the Asian NICs is largely incremental in character and the consequence of a variety of causal events which are not accounted for by established theories.