Social Security in Selected East Asian Countries: An Annotated Bibliography

Abstract

Australia's involvement with East Asian countries has been increasing over recent times. The Social Policy Research Centre has collaborated with The Asia-Australia Institute in fostering an interest in issues of social policy in the region. This bibliography has taken as its focus one aspect, social security, in the following eleven East Asian countries: China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand. The year 1980 was taken as our starting point. Social security is taken to be concerned with aspects of financial support for certain population groups in need of assistance. The topic overlaps with consideration of more general social welfare issues; however, items concerned with issues other than social security itself have not been included here except where they are inextricably interlocked with social security itself. Family support for the aged, for instance, is the subject of much research and a large literature, including discussions of the old-age security incentive for high fertility rates. Works on such topics are only included here where they also have specific mention of social security programs. The purpose of this bibliography is to gather together works written in English that are relatively easily accessible in Australia. Naturally, there is much published in journals and in languages of the individual countries that has not been included here. Readers are directed to consult also the page entitled 'Other Sources' following this Introduction. As an initial step in the preparation, on-line bibliographic searches were made on a number of databases. The resources of the SPRC library and other material held in the Centre were also used to identify further items for inclusion. The scope of the bibliography is defined by the keywords chosen which range widely over social security issues. Users with particular social security interests will gain from a careful reading of the keyword definitions.