FFJ 10TH ANNIVERSARY WORKSHOPEuropean & Asian
Perspectives on Welfare Issues

Programme

18 October 2019 | 9.00 to 13.00
EHESS, Room AS1_08 (Basement)
54 boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris
Contact: ffj@ehess.fr

9.00 | Welcome Remarks
Sébastien Lechevalier (EHESS, CCJ-FFJ)9.10 | Ageing Society and Long-term Care
Joe Leung (Hong Kong University)
China is facing the demographic transition of rapid society ageing, largely due to the One-child policy implemented in
1980. Key features include its middle-income economy (ageing society without being rich), the large size of its ageing
population, rapid ageing speed, and significant regional, gender and rural-urban differences. While the needs for longterm care have been escalating, social care services have largely remained under-developed. The service gaps havebeen aggravated by the rapid eroding informal family care. Recent policy reforms include the piloting of long-term
insurance, facilitating privately-operated homes for the aged, and government purchase of services on community-basedcare. Besides building up a financially sustainable LTC system, a comprehensive regulatory framework is required toassure service quality (professional workforce, measurement of needs, standardization of service inputs, informationmanagement, outcome evaluation, and monitoring of service providers) and the integration of hospital-based healthcare and social care in the community.

9.50 | The 2023 French Pension Reform: The Last Reform?
Antoine Bozio (EHESS)The current French government has presented the outlines of a vast structural reform of the French pension system.
The main idea is to unify the various mandatory pension schemes into common rules aiming to achieve long-term
financial balance. In the reform process strong debates emerged within government and within unions on the merits of
the reform ambitioned. On one side, some in the government have argued for abandoning the reform plan in favour of anincrease in statutory retirement ages in order to reduce public pension spending in the shorter term, while some unions
have criticized the reform for leading to a strong increase in the retirement age. This paper confronts the terms of thepublic debate with the real trade-off that faces the French pension system in the decades to come.

10.30 | Immigration and Social Investment
Giuliano Bonoli (Université de Lausanne)
This paper offers an assessment of the suitability of the social investment strategy to Europe’s increasingly multiculturalsocieties and its ability to effectively promote immigrant integration in the labour market. It argues that the benefit
of social investment interventions for immigrants may be lower than expected for two main reasons. First, there areaccess biases in most typical social investment policies (e.g. childcare, active labour market policies) that tend to limit
participation by non-natives. Second, employer preferences in recruitment and labour market discrimination are also
likely to limit the potential of social investment intervention for immigrants. These two factors help to account for the factthat the most social investment oriented welfare states that are found in the Nordic countries are not obtaining the best
results in terms of immigrant integration.

11.10 | Coffee Break11.30 | Different Policy Responses to Labor Market Dualization in Western
Europe and East Asia
Takuji Tanaka (Hitotsubashi University)
Over the past decade, labor market dualization has attracted growing interests among scholars in Western Europe andEast Asia. However, there is no consensus on the definition and the causes of dualization, among European scholars.
East Asian scholars tend to exaggerate regional and cultural homogeneity in East Asia. This paper proposes a theoreticalframework to compare dualization and the politics dealing with dualization in Western Europe and East Asia, focusing
on the timings of democratization and post-industrialization. In European countries and Japan, post-industrialization
progressed after the establishment of the welfare state. These countries were faced with a trade-off between policies
dealing with old and new social risks. In most East Asian countries, democratization took place almost at the same time
as post-industrialization. These countries were not faced with serious trade-off and introduced easily policies dealing
with new social risks. This paper compares political responses dealing with dualization in France, Japan, South Korea,and Taiwan, and verifies these hypotheses.

12.10 | Public Hospitals in Crisis: Governance Reforms in Norway and France inComparative Perspective
Yohann Aucante (EHESS)
The discourse about hospital crisis is an old theme. The current strike movement in the emergency sector gives a newillustration of this. Public hospitals have been exposed to à constant flow of administrative reforms in order to change
their governance and make these heavy machineries more effective. In spite of the similar doctrines underlying thesereforms, we can find very different forme of implementation, response and results. Drawing from the cases of two highspending countries, the paper will seek to make sense of these reforms in their contexts, but also point to their innercontradictions when it comes to democratic governance, efficiency and the quality of care in the core health-providing
institutions.

12.50 | Concluding Remarks