A Comparison of the U.S. and Japanese Social Welfare Systems
The welfare state is broadly defined as "a form of political economy in which the state assumes responsibility for the general welfare of its population, especially its most vulnerable elements (Sodaro, 2004, p. 308)." Welfare programs are those programs in which spending targets education, housing, health care, pensions or social security, unemployment compensation, food subsidies, family allowances, and so forth. The term welfare state was first used in Great Britain n the 1930s and 1940s, but it has since been used to describe, at least in part, the kinds of programs and policies that are found in many nations in the world today.
In a few countries, the twentieth century welfare state began to take form in the decades between World War I and World War II. Great Britain, Sweden, Germany, and the United States are often identified as important examples of the modern welfare state (Rubenstein, 1989).
Another country that is said to have developed many of the policies and programs that represent a welfare state is Japan. Most industrially advanced countries expanded their welfare programs after World War II. Japan, partially because of the damage that was done to the country, its economy, and all of its public service systems during World War II, also experienced the expansion of its welfare programs after 1945 (Sodaro, 2004).
In fact, it was in the years following World War II that the economic systems of both the United States and Japan, along with Canada and most of Western Europe underwent a transformation from industrial economies to postindustrial economies. This meant that more than one-half of the workforce in these countries worked in the service sector of the economy rather than in industry itself. Michael Sodaro (2004) says that "as the economically advanced democracies blazed the trails of postindustrialism from the 1960s onward, their go...