Introduction: globalizing welfare - an evolving Asian-European dialogue

The welfare state is essentially a European invention (Flora 1986–87, p. xii) and it has over the last 70 years ‘experienced its greatest proliferation and expansion in north-western Europe’ (Castles et al. 2010). The World Economic Forum had, surprisingly, ‘The Nordic Way’ as one of the major topics for discussion at its annual meeting in Davos in 2011, and a couple of years later the cover of the liberal weekly magazine The Economist conveyed the message: ‘The next supermodel: why the world should look at the Nordic countries’ (The Economist 2013), which was even more surprising given its traditionally critical view on comprehensive, expensive welfare states. Studies of the development of welfare states, both single-nation and comparative studies, have until recent decades been dominated by Western, particularly European, scholars. Welfare state research has, however, expanded greatly since the 1990s. Social and welfare policy has become a truly global field of study. The growing global academic and political attention to this field of research can be regarded as a result of rapidly broadening international epistemic communities in the social sciences, a greater concern with social, economic and gender inequalities within and across nations, and as a result of an expansion of social and welfare policies in more and more countries around the globe. Formulated at the time of emerging pioneering European welfare states towards the end of the nineteenth century, Adolph Wagner’s ‘law’, on the expectation that far-reaching changes in economy and society would lead to more state intervention and rising public expenditure, has proved to be an apt forecast of global developments (Wagner 1893).