Contribution of Health Care Decommodification Index to the Analysis of the Marginalisation of East Asian Countries in Comparative Welfare Studies

Abstract

This article is concerned with two responses to recent discourses on the classification of welfare regimes. The first is a rising interest in constructing different criteria such as health care decommodification, education decommodification, and defamilisation. The second response is the concern that East Asian countries are under-represented in the 18 OECD members studied by Esping-Andersen (1990). This article contributes to these two responses through the implementation of two analytical tasks. The first task is to expand the health care decommodification index developed by Bambra (2005a) to cover the 18 OECD members studied by Esping-Andersen (1990) and five additional East Asian countries. The second task is to demonstrate how the health care decommodification index can be used to contribute to the analysis of the view of Walker and Wong (2004, 2005) on the marginalisation of East Asian countries in comparative welfare studies.