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Quantitative comparative research, particularly in the form of pooled time series cross-sectional regression, has been scrutinised ever since it first contributed to the comparative analysis of social policies.Thereby, model specifications and operationalisations of dependent and independent variables have largely been influenced by in-depth studies representing small samples of European cases.As data quality and availability for Asian countries is improving, there is an immediate temptation to ease the small-N problem of quantitative comparative research by expanding country samples.Equally, there is a temptation for researchers to revert to well-established theories in the Western literature to explore Asian countries.This paper critically assesses the limitations of both approaches.It will do so by tracing the origins of the most important theoretical traditions accounting for the impact of globalisation on social policies in Western context.It shows Western theories of social policy development vis-a-vis growing world and capital market interdependence are hardly able to represent trajectories of Asian countries.The paper, therefore, calls for a new and independent surge of in-depth case studies of Asian countries to inform a new round of more comprehensive, truly comparative, deductive research in the future.