2022 Volume 22 Pages 59-71
Recent social policy development proposes new types of redistribution like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which integrate social security benefits and tax burdens. When the government adopts such an ew redistribution method, it needs to grasp people’s personal information on income and tax and set the appropriate target groups. In Japan, the newly established “My-Number” is expected to be a basic infrastructure for that data collection, but it currently cannot obtain the information about income and tax connected with other personal data. The local governments deal with the income and tax data very strictly, and they protect the information by their own unique rules, which the central government does not govern.
This paper examines people’s attitudes toward data linkages that include income and tax information when governments adopt new social benefits through a survey experiment. The results indicate that respondents tend to favor social benefits with data linkages that inc1ude income and tax information. The method of data collection may be as important as the selection of benefit targets. In addition,the author divided respondents into three groups according to their level of information sensitivity and conducted the same analysis for each group. For the group that is tolerant of information use,t he introduction of benefits was shown to increase support. For the middle group, the adoption of data linkages increased support
