Economic inequality and social exclusion in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan

It is widely reported that the level of inequality in East Asian countries has been gradually increasing since the 1980s, along with the full-fledged adoption of globalisation and the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. ¹ Concomitantly with this trend, there is a growing academic interest in the causes and consequences of economic inequality in East Asia. Although studies of inequality have been a growing industry in the East Asian political economy literature, theoretical and empirical findings in the studies of the causes and consequences of inequality are predominantly focused on advanced democracies in Europe and America. Since the 1980s, several important political-economic factors explaining the causes of inequality have been reported in the literature. To name a few, the centralization of wage bargaining and unionisation, electoral systems, and partisan politics have been singled out as main factors that explain the variations of inequality in developed democracies (Bartels 2008; Iversen and Soskice 2006; Kenworthy and Pontusson 2005; Korpi and Palme 1998; Rueda and Pontusson 2000; Wallerstein 1999).