Professor Ku is one of founders the Taiwanese Association of Social Policy (the President, 2009-14), and one of key members in founding the East Asian Social Policy research network (the Chair, 2011-12). Professor Ku has written widely on welfare development and policy debates in Taiwan, extending to comparative study on East Asian welfare, and published 10 books and over 80 papers.

Abstract: Following the three welfare regimes constructed by Esping-Andersen, many scholars have paid much attention to the question of whether there is a regime, differing from liberal, conservative and social democracy, in other parts of the world. However, those discussions are mostly based on conceptual classification, rather than empirical analysis. Our study published in 2007 has demonstrated the developmental characteristics of East Asian welfare states presented by Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, examined with a new set of fifteen indicators for factor and cluster analysis of twenty countries in the 1980s and 1990s. This speech will present our most updated analysis of East Asian developmental welfare regimes with data in the first decade of 21st century, seeing what changes and discussing its implications to further East Asian welfare studies.