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Developing the new framework of 'life-mix', which considers the mixed patterns of caring and working in different periods of life, this book systematically explores the interplay of productivism, women, care and work in East Asia and Europe. The book ranges across four key aspects of welfare -- childcare, parental leave, employment support and pensions -- to illustrate how policies affect women in various periods of their lives. Policy case studies from France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, South Korea, Sweden and the UK, show how welfare could support people's caring and working lives. This book forms a prescient examination of how productivist thinking underpins regimes and impacts women's welfare, care and work in both the East and West.

Two analytical tasks have been conducted in this article. The first is to construct a defamilisation typology that covers eighteen OECD members and four tiger economies (namely Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore). The second is to demonstrate this typology's contribution to the debate on the existence of two essential preconditions for the development of an all-encompassing East Asian welfare regime: (1) the existence of significant differences in the welfare systems between the East Asian countries and the non-East Asian OECD countries; and (2) the existence of significant similarities in the welfare systems of the East Asian countries.

This article examines the social exclusion experienced by Chinese people in Britain. It challenges the view that the problem is caused by the cultural characteristics of the Chinese community. It shows that the main cause lies in their way of seeking social integration through market participation. The necessity for many Chinese families to secure their market position not only keeps them at a distance from mainstream society but also from their own ethnic community. While they are not outsiders in either of these groups, they only have one foot in each of them.

The article studies the relation between social welfare development and economic development in China and Hong Kong. It is found that social welfare in these two economies makes important contributions to economic development, and that its expansion is associated positively with economic growth. However, despite this, it is still difficult to judge whether or not social welfare in Hong Kong and China can be defined as well-developed. Its social status, judged by the independent value ascribed to it, is apparently less than would be inferred from the size of the material resources actually allocated to it in both economies. It is essentially subordinate to economic considerations and has no separate integrity.

This article contributes to the search for suitable approaches to combat social exclusion faced by disabled people in capitalist wage labour markets. Referring to policy and service examples in Hong Kong, it reviews four social exclusion approaches – the Moral Underclass (MUD), Social Integrationist (SID), Redistributive (RED) and Collective Production (COP) approaches. These approaches are explored in relation to three key issues: (1) the diverse preferences of disabled people; (2) the myth of infeasibility regarding unconventional approaches and (3) the defects of the medical model of disability. The article argues that the MUD and SID approaches are more associated with the medical model of disability and emphasise individual changes. The RED and COP approaches contain more features of the social model of disability and are in favour of social and structural changes. The COP approach stresses the diverse preferences of disabled people and supports innovative services to combat social exclusion.