International complementarities of social policy development: How trade flows influenced early welfare state formation

While the scholarly debate on the nexus between globalization and welfare state development in advanced industrialized economies and the Global South is abundant, studies have investigated the Global North and South mostly in isolation from each other. We argue that their embeddedness in an internationalized economy and global postwar order have mutually shaped welfare state development in Western Europe, North America, East Asia and Latin America, a factor that has largely been neglected in the scholarly discourse. Against the background of historically grown interdependencies and an international division of labour, we promote the argument that social policy development is marked by international complementarities, both geo-economic and geo-political. In this study, we provide first evidence for our argument for welfare state development in Latin America and East Asia.