The pandemic of Covid-19 exposed critical gaps in social policy and underscored the foundational role of families and households in both societal and economic stability. This introductory chapter to a Special Issue explores the interdependence between formal economic participation and unpaid domestic labour – collectively referred to as ‘social reproduction’. Drawing on feminist political economy, the chapter addresses how gendered and undervalued reproductive labour is essential to economic growth and the realisation of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly gender equality and inclusive growth. This Special Issue uses South Korea as a comparative case study due to its unique economic trajectory, rapid demographic ageing, stark gender inequalities, and limited social protection systems. The country’s long working hours, low fertility rate, and pronounced wage and care burdens on women illustrate how inadequate social reproduction support can threaten broader social and economic sustainability. The pandemic further intensified these issues, disrupting institutional supports and deepening inequalities. This Special Issue collectively examines how policies across different contexts either alleviate or exacerbate the tensions between productive and reproductive labour, using South Korea as a focal point for comparison. This comparative analysis highlights the need for structural reforms and cultural change to support effective social reproduction policies, emphasising that gender-equal leave, accessible childcare, and shared caregiving responsibilities are crucial for work-family balance and social well-being. South Korea’s experience illustrates both progress and ongoing challenges, offering valuable lessons on the limitations of market-driven approaches and the importance of resilient, state-supported family policies.

This study bridges the study of social inclusion with welfare regime theory. By linking social inclusion with welfare regimes, we establish a novel analytical framework for assessing global trends and national divergences in social inclusion based on a multidimensional view of the concept. While scholars have developed typologies for social inclusion and welfare regimes independent of each other, limited insights exist on how social inclusion relates to welfare regime typologies. We develop a social inclusion index for 225 countries using principal component analysis with 10 measures of social inclusion from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals Indicators Database. We then employ clustering algorithms to inductively group countries based on the index. We find six “worlds” of social inclusion based on the index and other social factors – the Low, Mid, and High Social Inclusion regimes and the Low, Mid, and High Social Exclusion regimes.

In this study, we focus on European immigration attitudes in the perspective of deservingness perceptions and political orientation. Our data are conducted from the European Social Survey (2016) database, which contains 21 European countries and 39,400 participants. We used the multilevel method to study the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. The results demonstrate that the more negative deservingness perceptions are, the more negative immigration attitudes more likely become. Moreover, country-level political orientation moderate the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. Deservingness perceptions have a greater role in explaining immigration attitudes on countries with political left-context, which gives us a new perspective to understand the public debates about immigration.

This article explores gender inequality in work–family balance since the pandemic from a comparative perspective. It examines the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on working mothers in the UK and South Korea, particularly the factors affecting their work–family balance. It also critically analyses work–family balance policies from a gender perspective. While a number of studies have examined work–family balance issues in both countries, there has been little comparative research on working mothers’ perceptions of the way childcare/unpaid work is distributed, and few policy comparisons involving the two countries. The findings from surveys conducted in 2020 show that mothers in both countries not only did more unpaid work but encountered challenges in balancing work and family during the pandemic. This article argues that policies must be further developed to promote equal sharing of paid and unpaid work between men and women.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have expanded the level and coverage of current social insurance and social assistance programs as well as implemented new programs. Based on three separate datasets, V-Dem V-Party dataset; fourteen structured expert interviews; and a dataset of 114 social security measures, we study the link between the welfare regime, pandemic-related social policy measures, and incumbents’ ideological stand. Does the pandemic-related social policy measures mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents? What role did the welfare regime play? We scrutinise eight OECD countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, and the US) representing three different welfare regimes: corporatist-conservative countries, liberal countries, and socio-democratic countries. The key findings of this article show that the pandemic-related social policy measures did not mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents.

This article investigates the life satisfaction consequences of migration through unique comparisons of “settler” migrants spanning three family generations and multiple European destinations with their “stayer” and “returnee” counterparts based in the origin country of Turkey. The data are drawn from 5,980 personal interviews conducted as part of the pioneering 2000 Families Survey. The results show that despite being monetarily the most impoverished across all destinations and generations studied, the settlers tend to be more satisfied with their lives than the “stayers” and the “returnees.” However, a downward trend is observed among younger generations, irrespective of their migration status and country context. The results confirm the significance of poverty and asset status for migrants’ and their descendants’ appraisal of life, as well as highlighting the independent effect of the context. Strikingly, however, those residing in countries with more generous welfare states proved not necessarily to be more satisfied.

The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

This article examines premature withdrawals from pension funds that were initiated as responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. It looks at withdrawal programmes both in emerging market and in advanced economies. Although measures might have been expedient in countries where social protection systems (social assistance and job furlough schemes) are relatively underdeveloped, they could also be regressive. Furthermore, they undermined the concept of pension funds as retirement income resources and, in some cases, they might threaten people’s living standards once they became old. The paper also suggests that such withdrawal programmes have a populist flavour.

This study provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of skill formation systems in Japan and South Korea, considering the nuances in active labour market policies (ALMPs) and institutional transformations in the post-industrial landscape. Both nations initially adopted segmentalist skill formation systems; however, they now exhibit divergent paths. Korea, in particular, has undergone institutional changes from segmentalist to a liberal skill formation system, with firms reducing their involvement in skill formation, resulting in a pronounced skill formation gap. Firms have curtailed their role in skill formation in alignment with environmental changes, and ALMPs have primarily centred on job creation for the elderly and small- and medium-sized enterprise employment subsidies. Conversely, Japan has maintained consistent policy approaches despite similar environmental changes. This study highlights that these divergent trajectories are rooted in the different stages of institutional maturity established during industrialization.

This manuscript compares gender equality in childcare leave policies across 21 countries and examines its relationship with gender equality in the labour market. To assess gender equality in childcare leave in each country, the duration gap and the uptake gap between genders in childcare leave are examined, and these two gaps are combined using Z-scores to measure the overall level of gender equality in childcare leave. Subsequently, the relationship between overall gender equality in childcare leave and labour market outcomes, such as gender employment and wage gaps, is explored. The results indicate that gender equality in childcare leave is generally highest in Scandinavian countries, moderate in Continental European countries, and mostly low in Eastern European countries. Furthermore, the degree of gender equality in childcare leave is negatively correlated with the gender employment gap, whereas no clear relationship is found with the gender wage gap.

Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunities beyond caregiving can be limited. Resources, like childcare services, can be crucial in supporting the reconciliation of care with other valued activities in life. This article contributes to the cross-national childcare policy literature by conceptualizing comparative indicators to assess the availability, accessibility, and affordability of childcare policy design for children with additional or complex care needs. It then applies these indicators to a comparison of childcare policy design in England and the Netherlands, providing an operationalization for further empirical analysis.

In this paper, we conduct an in-depth review of and commentary on two frameworks for international comparative work focused on education systems and skill formation – specifically, welfare regime and production regime approaches. We focus on how tertiary education is understood to function relationally within a national policy repertoire and explore the interplay between education and economic systems. Whereas the welfare regime literature illuminates why some regimes are conducive to human capital production and create more equitable educational and labour market opportunities, the production regime literature focuses on the ways that actors such as government, educational institutions, and unions optimise skill formation. These two theoretical perspectives offer both rival and complementary explanations of varying patterns in public investment, differentiation in education systems, and participation rates in tertiary education across countries. Our analytical account provides useful insights for understanding different national education policies and framing future research, including informing these perspectives with the more recent theoretical contributions of the social investment approach. In relation to changing conceptions of the knowledge economy, education, skill development, and the nature of employment, these two theoretical perspectives continue to provide useful conceptual lenses to examine the education/skill /employment nexus.

Informal social protection systems (ISPs) continue to play a significant role where government-sanctioned social security measures do not reach vulnerable populations. Despite their essence and utility, they remain marginalised in social policy, theory, and practice, and thus many call for their integration. However, research has often overlooked factors embedded in the integration process particularly how these can affect the future performance of ISPs if they are to interact with formal systems. Adopting an argumentative conceptual approach, and a synthesis of social policy literature on ISPs, we provide a framework for managing relationships with actors to optimise the interaction between ISPs and formal social welfare systems through a conceptual framework that utilises design thinking and community development principles. We outline three essential conditions for effective engagement with ISPs to achieve social impact, urging government and others to engage with empathy; treat communities as equal collaborators; and keep a social justice focus.

Facing dwindling birthrates, East Asia has shown unprecedented fertility-oriented family policy expansion. Despite this shared objective, this research argues that East Asian family policy has varied in ‘inclusiveness’, namely, the extent to which it equally promotes all births, irrespective of familial socioeconomic status in particular. Firstly, from an inclusiveness-centred perspective, this article builds three different ideal pronatalist family policy approaches: the ‘inclusive’, where pronatalist family support is provided for almost everyone; the ‘selective’, where it is more accessible to middle-/upper-income households; and the ‘residual’, where it is concentrated on low-income classes. Guided by this conceptual framework, it compares Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It reveals that Japan and Singapore promoted a selective path, and Taiwan favoured a residual one, whilst South Korea pioneered more inclusive support. However, it also suggests that the other three societies recently adopted more inclusive pronatalist family policies, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Poverty prevention is a central concern of welfare states, and the redistribution of financial resources has been a major strategy to realise it. The differences in addressees, extent, and conditions of this redistribution have been intensively studied. The relevance of family in poverty prevention policies, though, has hardly been analysed, although all forms of welfare redistribution “factor in” family in one way or another, and particularly so in poverty prevention. We analyse how family membership impacts welfare state redistribution to the poor to identify redistributive logics in terms of family, that is the unequal redistribution of public resources to particular family types. We systematically analyse and present the similarities and differences in these redistributive logics, using the micro-simulation model EUROMOD for the countries of the EU. The results show that poor families benefit from anti-poverty measures in form of additional benefits, but family-related financial obligations often exceed these.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is among the most important services for children and their parents as it promotes children’s development and enables mothers’ employment. Previous research has shown that there is an educational gradient as children of mothers with a low education level participate less in ECEC services, but less is known about the development of this inequality. This study, using EU-SILC survey data, focuses on the development of inequality in ECEC use of children under 3 years of age during 2004–2019, and on disparities between three categories of education levels among mothers. The results show that, together with increasing ECEC participation rates, overall inequality has increased in Europe. Inequality has increased between low- and other education levels, whereas in a few cases, a decrease has happened between medium- and high-educated mothers. It is important to pay attention to socioeconomic disparities with rising participation rates.

Area-based initiatives are designed to improve economic, physical, and social outcomes in a formally defined territorial area. A considerable amount of literature highlights that the implementation of this approach differs considerably between Western European countries. The study identifies three common approaches. The first, defined as a sector-based approach, focuses on the coordination of welfare services in a specific area. This approach may promote an efficient organisation of specific welfare sectors but does not seek to implement a multi-sectoral approach. The second, defined as the integrated approach, pays particular attention to institutional arrangements. The third, informal relations-based approach, is developed mainly in intersubjective relations and focuses on individual abilities, often without systematic engagement to change how public and private institutions work. In this study, I outlined a conceptual framework for a new perspective in area-based initiatives that recognises the plurality of autonomies that operate in a community.

Governments in both England and Korea prioritise a comparable set of childcare policies and strategies to promote young children’s development and wellbeing and maternal labour market participation. This paper compares the two marketised childcare systems and policies and their impact on family outcomes in the context of public policy aims to increase maternal employment. Despite Korean financial support for its childcare system being proportionally much greater than England’s, maternal employment rates in England far outstrip those in Korea. As our conceptual approach, we adopt Kagan’s (Kagan et al.; Kagan with Landsberg) application of systems theory to childcare systems. Important aspects of these two marketised systems and their infrastructure appear to be operating inefficiently, impeding equitable access to high-quality, sustainable provision. This evidence fails to explain, though, lower maternal employment levels in Korea, where a lack of active labour market policies coupled with socio-cultural factors form additional barriers. Both countries may be close to tipping points in childcare policy development. Extending childcare support beyond working families and curbing market operations may need considering in England, while in Korea expanding high-quality universal childcare support through public and not-for-profit providers and family-friendly employment policies requires addressing.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have raised concerns about the relevance and reliability of current measures and indices of child well-being. This article aims to bridge a significant knowledge gap by examining how these indices respond to shocks and exploring attributes of shock-responsive indicators related to child well-being. Drawing on the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 16 on child well-being and the Korean Child Well-being Index, the study conducts a comparative analysis of differences in the design and purpose of indices that influence their resilience to shocks. Subsequently, it proposes an approach for evaluating the ‘shock-responsiveness’ of key outcome indicators of child well-being before going on to review how child income poverty measures performed during COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. After finding that child well-being indices, at present, are not able to fully capture the effects of covariate crises on children, the article concludes with insights for policymakers and researchers.

The varieties of capitalism thesis suggest high-income democracies cluster into distinct types, with complementarities between political, economic, and social institutions shaping long-run cross-national differences. Although featuring strongly in the comparative political economy and social policy literatures, criminal justice has received relatively little attention in this debate, but some have suggested penal policy variations map against varieties of capitalism ideal types. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis – and data for 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over a 25-year period – we explore connections between cross-national differences in penal punitiveness and key institutional features identified in these debates. We find that the degree of punitiveness strongly overlaps with varieties of capitalism ideal types, arguing criminal justice regimes constitute a dimension of institutional complementarity in varieties of capitalism.