The following three chapters illustrate the findings from the previous portion of the book by selecting one representative from each cluster: a protective welfare state (India); a productive welfare state (South Korea); and a weak dual welfare state (Brazil). These case studies are intended as heuristic devices, rather than another hard test of the hypotheses in this book. The purpose of the case illustrations is to provide a more nuanced and detailed look at the primary research finding: as international market demands systematically affect government policy decisions in developing countries, distinct institutional arrangements governing the distribution of welfare persist and, as a consequence, middle-class labor groups are the ones most directly hurt by race to the bottom pressures. The country overviews essentially provide greater in-depth analysis of how national social policy configurations are structuring responses to globalization. The addition of the case study analysis allows a more applied understanding of the consequences of globalization in terms of cutbacks (RTB) and institutional changes. In addition, they permit consideration of the role of other factors not emphasized in the quantitative analysis, such as democracy.

One caveat should be kept in mind as the case studies unfold in the following chapters. Because the causal linkages have been empirically verified in the earlier chapters, I take on the broad panorama of each country's political economy and related social welfare strategies in a swift, bold, and unrestrained manner.