Democratization and Welfare State Development in Taiwan by Christian Aspalter

Author:Christian Aspalter [Aspalter, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Public Policy, Social Services & Welfare
ISBN: 9780754616030
Google: dYu4AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2002-01-15T03:48:39+00:00

Social Assistance and Social Services

In the development of the welfare state system in Taiwan, social assistance did not play a major part until very recently. The first piece of legislation regarding social assistance was the Social Relief Law in 1943, enacted still in Mainland China. This law was designed to offer help to segments of society according to their particular circumstances, but not according to their financial situation. Aid was recommended to those only who were poor because of high age, youth, pregnancy, disability or disaster (cf Ku, 2002).

For almost the next four decades nothing changed in this matter. Poverty was perceived to be self-made, and the individual had the responsibility for not getting poor and for dealing with this problem. Therefore, the government paid little attention to the problem of poverty in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early 1970s, the Taiwan Provincial government and the Taipei city government implemented two new community development programs that were influenced by the War on Poverty in the United States a decade earlier. These programs were the Shao-Kang program (‘little well-off) implemented in Taiwan Province and the An-Kang program (‘healthy and wealthy’) set up in Taipei city. Both new schemes aimed at eradicating poverty by launching a wave of new social assistance benefits and social services, including vocational training, short-term loans for the unemployment, residential care for family-less chronically ill and disabled children, social assistance benefits and low-cost housing at the community level for low-income families (H.S. Chan, 1985: 327-8). Before 1980, only the local and provincial governments were in charge of providing social assistance, but not the central government (Ku, 1995: 38).

In the year 1980, the government changed its attitude in the field of social assistance to the poor and implemented the new Social Assistance Law of 1980. It started to determine the need for social assistance by focusing on the financial means of the poor and not the causes of their poverty. The Social Assistance Law of 1980, however, abstained from giving a clear formula for determining the deserving poor. Hence, government officials could and did set up an incredibly low poverty line, to limit the use of government funds needed for social assistance programs.

Only the new Social Assistance Law of 1997 introduced a poverty line, which was set at 60 percent of per capita consumption expenditures in the previous year. Some scholars suggest that up to 5 percent of the population may now qualify for social assistance with this new poverty line (Ku, 1995, 2002; MOI, 1998a).

The number of poor people receiving indoor relief was constantly increasing from 2,571 people in 1950 to 11,334 people in 1990. Conversely, the number of people receiving outdoor relief began to decline rapidly in the 1970s. As a result the number of recipients of out-door relief was reduced by more than 85 percent in the same period (see Table 18).

Table 18: Poor People Receiving Benefits of the Social Assistance Scheme (1950-1990)

In the year 1986, a total number of 114,076 persons - which counted for 0.

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