Revisiting income-maintenance-based welfare regime classification: Japan in comparative perspective

Abstract Esping-Andersen’s (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism classified contemporary welfare states into three different regime types: liberal, conservative, and social-democratic. Although the welfare regime was used as a broad concept, the operationalisation largely focused on income maintenance programmes in his typology. Intellectual efforts have been invested in testing and expanding Esping-Andersen’s typology. Within the welfare modelling business, Japan is one of the controversial cases, as it was included in both Esping-Andersen’s typology and the East Asian welfare model. This paper provides an up-to-date classification of Esping-Andersen’s typology using cluster analysis. The results show that the patterns of institutional features of income maintenance programmes in 18 OECD countries and 4 East Asian economies did not correspond to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) prediction. Furthermore, this paper uses Japan as an analytical example to demonstrate that more caution is needed when applying the concept of welfare regime to analyse cash benefits.