Abstract
This Special Issue consists of three articles based on Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research in Japan. The authors are members of the MIS-Japan research team. The MIS approach has recently been developed in United Kingdom to define what level of income is necessary to provide a minimum acceptable standard of living. It brings together two approaches to setting budget standards: the "consensual" negotiation of budgets by panels of ordinary people, and budgets based on research evidence and expert judgments. In this introduction, we explain why we decided to conduct MIS research in Japan, and indicate the significance of the minimum standard of living in reconstructing the Japanese welfare system.
