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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Soonman Kwon, PhD, Department of Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, Seoul National University, 28 Yonkon-dong, Chongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, +82-2-740-8875, kwons@snu.ac.kr

Following the change of government, Korean welfare state has experienced a change in the late 1990s. The non-conservative government rapidly extended the population coverage of pension and unemployment insurance, and government expenditure on social policy has increased rapidly, leading some analysts to regard those changes as a departure of Korean welfare state from productivism/welfare developmentalism. This paper aims to explore the relationship between the nature of and recent change in Korean welfare state and its population health. It will first examine the nature of Korean welfare state and whether it has made a fundamental reconfiguration of the social policy system, a seemingly paradoxical change facing globalization and neo-liberalism, or it has been a re-alignment of welfare state to new productive regime. Although rigorous empirical analysis is not possible by data limitations, an examination of the trend of health outcomes can provide a clue to the inference on the relationship between welfare state policy and population health in Korea. The role of economic crisis as important contexts for Korean welfare state policy and politics will be examined, too. This paper can shed a light on the research on the welfare state policy/politics and health outcomes by emphasizing the need to examine the detailed institutions of welfare state policies and politics in addition to macro-level data, and the relative effectiveness of health policy versus upstream social policy on health outcomes.

Learning Objectives:

• Develop an understanding of the relationship between welfare state policy/politics and population health

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No