Economic System and Welfare Regime Dynamics in Japan Since the Early 2000s – The Case of Occupational Pensions

This article discusses significant changes of Japanese occupational pensions since the early 2000s. Our analysis shows that these schemes have been key components of policies to promote private welfare provision and have been highly compatible with human capital investment strategies that are based on long-term employment relationships of regular workers. However, since the 1990s, occupational pensions have come under increased pressure due to underfunding problems caused by depressed stock markets and changes in accounting standards that made these underfunding problems apparent. In response to these challenges Japanese companies have restructured their occupational pension arrangements. The nature of these efforts can be explained with reference to existing institutional complementarities with the economic system on the one hand and changes in the cost-benefit calculations of employers, employees and the civil service on the other hand. Whereas complementarities, especially with human resource management factors, have ultimately defined the limits of these changes, an actor-centered analysis helps to explain the particular nature of changes within these boundaries. Introduction In the last two decades, two strands of social science research have significantly advanced our understanding of the institutional configurations of advanced industrial societies. The first strand of literature, profoundly influenced by Esping-Andersen’s seminal The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), has stressed cross-national differences among welfare-states and identified distinct types of welfare regimes across the world. The second (e.g. Deeg and Jackson, 2007; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Whitely, 1999; Hollingsworth and Boyer, 1997) has stressed the embeddedness of national business practices in their cultural and institutional context, with the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VOC) literature elucidating the institutional foundations of diverse national ‘varieties’ of economic systems or, more narrowly, production regimes. Subsequent research (e.g. Schröder, 2009; Iverson, 2005; Ebbinghaus and Manow, 2001) has started to bridge these two strands of literature by investigating the links between particular forms of social protection and economic systems or national systems of production. The latter literature has focused primarily on the static aspects