COVID-19 and welfare state trajectory in South Korea: Stagnation, consolidation, or transformation?

In order to protect health and minimize financial damage to the public, South Korea responded to the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic with various social policy tools. In the first 9 months of 2020, nearly three dozen pieces of social policy legislation were passed along with four rounds of supplementary budget approval, many of which explicitly focused on coping with the pandemic (Shim, 2021). Specific social policy measures adopted ranged from conventional ones such as health care and social assistance supports to more unconventional means such as tax breaks and university tuition fee reductions. In view of the speed and the level of political consensus pertinent to social policy decisions during this period, the social policy responses to the pandemic were swift and bipartisan in South Korea (Shim, 2021). Furthermore, in light of the country’s previous experiences of turning ‘a crisis’ into ‘an opportunity’ for welfare expansion, the pandemic could potentially have a significant effect on the nature of South Korea’s welfare state.More than 3 years have passed since the outbreak of the pandemic. In response to the latest call to update government’s social policy responses to the pandemic from a global perspective (Dorlach, 2023), the goal here is to track key social policy changes (or lack thereof) in South Korea and examine what effect they had on the overall structure of the welfare state. One of the key social policy initiatives proposed by the president Moon Jae-in during the pandemic was the expansion of employment and work injury insurance schemes to theretofore uncovered segments of the population. This includes various forms of self-employed or agency workers such as artists, delivery workers, door-to-door salespersons, and replacement drivers. The president’s ambition to bolster the employment security net was made clear in his ‘Korean New Deal’ road map in July 2020; a year later, the president reconfirmed his intention with the ‘Korean New Deal 2.0’ road map. Upon examining concrete legislative measures taken, the president has filled many blind spots in the employment and work injury insurance schemes. Step-by-step, employment insurance increased its scope and took legal effect, covering various types of artists (December 2020), then workers in twelve different occupation categories (July 2021), and finally, covering messenger service workers and replacement drivers (January 2022). As a result of expanded coverage, nearly a million new