IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/6487.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income transfers to the elderly in East Asia: testing Asian values

Author

Listed:
  • Kwon, Huck-Ju

Abstract

This article examines the role of family and the state in relation to the living standards of the elderly in East Asia. It tries to test whether familial arrangement according to Confucian ethics, which are still taken seriously in East Asia, secures the minimum standard of living for the elderly. This article, first, examines the social policy institutions for the elderly in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. It argues that public policy in the region assumes the family as primarily responsible for elderly people's living standards. Secondly, this article analyses private and public income transfers to elderly households, based on micro-data sets for South Korea and Taiwan. It argues that private transfers do make important contributions to the income of the elderly households, particularly poorer households, while public transfers do not make any significant impact. This suggests that Confucian ethics are still working. Private transfers, however, fail to secure the minimum standards of living of the elderly. The elderly households are far more prone to poverty. The findings of this paper support the case for state action to protect the living standards of the elderly in East Asia.

Suggested Citation

  • Kwon, Huck-Ju, 1999. "Income transfers to the elderly in East Asia: testing Asian values," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 6487, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:6487
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6487/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yeun-wen Ku, 1997. "Welfare Capitalism in Taiwan," Palgrave Macmillan Books, Palgrave Macmillan, number 978-0-230-37787-5, December.
    2. Didier Jacobs, 1998. "Social Welfare Systems in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis including Private Welfare," CASE Papers case10, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    3. Didier Jacobs, 1998. "Social Welfare Systems in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis including Private Welfare," CASE Papers 010, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Roger Goodman & Sarah Harper, 2006. "Introduction: Asia's Position in the New Global Demography," Oxford Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(4), pages 373-385.
    2. Barrientos, Armando, 2012. "What is the Role of Social Pensions in Asia?," ADBI Working Papers 351, Asian Development Bank Institute.
    3. John Gibson & Susan Olivia & Scott Rozelle, 2011. "How widespread are nonlinear crowding out effects? The response of private transfers to income in four developing countries," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(27), pages 4053-4068.
    4. John Gibson & Susan Olivia & Scott Rozelle, 2006. "How Widespread are Non-linear Crowding Out Out Effects? The Response of Private Transfers to Income in Four Developing Countries," Working Papers in Economics 06/01, University of Waikato.
    5. Schmähl, Winfried, 2002. "Old-age security in Bhutan: From lump-sum payments towards a pension scheme," Working papers of the ZeS 06/2002, University of Bremen, Centre for Social Policy Research (ZeS).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Huck-ju Kwon, 1999. "Income Transfers to the Elderly in East Asia: Testing Asian Values," CASE Papers 027, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    2. Paola Profeta & Simona Scabrosetti, 2010. "The Political Economy of Taxation," Books, Edward Elgar Publishing, number 13258.
    3. Sarah Kuypers, 2014. "The East Asian welfare regime: reality or fiction," Working Papers 1404, Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp.
    4. Manow, Philip, 2001. "Globalization, corporate finance, and coordinated capitalism: Pension finance in Germany and Japan," MPIfG Working Paper 01/5, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    5. Sorin-George Toma, 2019. "Sustainable Economic Development: The Case Of Taiwan," Annals - Economy Series, Constantin Brancusi University, Faculty of Economics, vol. 3, pages 206-212, June.
    6. Ito Peng & Joseph Wong, 2008. "Institutions and Institutional Purpose: Continuity and Change in East Asian Social Policy," Politics & Society, , vol. 36(1), pages 61-88, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Public pensions; retirement policy; East Asia;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R14 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Land Use Patterns
    • J01 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General - - - Labor Economics: General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:6487. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.