Withstanding the plague: Institutional resilience of the East Asian welfare state.

As the origin place of the COVID-19 outbreak, East Asian welfare states have largely survived the immediate health threats out of the pandemic shock but have yet to deal with its dire social consequences. This paper offers an institutionalist account-in terms of the institutional resilience of the welfare state-to grasp the policy dynamics in East Asia. We select four cases under scrutiny: China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, to analyse the major trend of social policy responses in this region.