Studying the health care systems in seven East Asian countries by the cluster analysis

Since Esping-Andersen (1990) presented the "three worlds of welfare capitalism" thesis based on his study of the OECD countries, there have been debates on whether East Asian countries form a separate world of welfare capitalism or not. The objective of this article is to demonstrate how the study of the health care systems in six East Asian countries (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Thailand) plus Japan contributes to the debate on the existence of a distinct welfare regime in East Asia. This objective is met by mainly using the evidence provided by health care typologies to test two hypotheses: 1) There are significant similarities between some of the health care systems in eleven OECD countries and those in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore, and 2) there are significant differences in the health care systems between Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore.