Democratization, Timing, and Different Social Investment Strategies in North-East Asia and Southern Europe

This paper compares the development of social investment strategies, with the main focus on childcare policies, in four countries –Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain since the beginning of the 1990s. This quartet of countries are similarly “laggards” when it comes to Social Investment Strategies, and share important commonalities in their welfare states and labor markets (Estévez-Abe, Yang and Cho 2016; Ferrera 2016; Saraceno 2016). Interestingly, however, their recent policy trajectories began to diverge in the past decades. Since the beginning of the 1990s thought to 2014 Spain and specially Korea have increased spending and supply of childcare provision while Italy and Japan failed to increase childcare provisions in significant ways (Estévez-Abe and Kim 2014; Estévez-Abe & Naldini 2016; León and Choi 2016). Nonetheless, as of 2014, there are signs that Japan has prioritized the rapid increase in the supply of childcare services. Ultimately, this paper seeks to unravel the causal mechanism responsible for promoting or stalling government commitment to increase the provision of childcare services. In order to understand the causal mechanism behind childcare policies, we investigate the relative importance of the following factors: (i) different timings of economic and political development; (ii) political competition; (iii) institutional structure; and (iv) policy legacies.