As the birthrate keep declining and aging population is increasingly growing, the sustainability of the social insurance system is in question. It is also true that the management of social insurance fund has become severe. In addition, the central question of this paper is that what factors determines the sustainability of the social insurance system in china. This paper examines the "historical burden" of state-owned enterprises, the impact of non-state-owned enterprises and state-owned enterprises on employee pension and medical insurance funds. Furthermore, this paper also examines the "financial dependency" of non-employed population's pension and medical insurance.

　This paper aims to explore the Japanese municipalities where urban sprawl is expected to deteriorate their financial conditions in a society characterized by decreasing and aging population. First, we estimate the local expenditure function using the cross-sectional data of 1,085 Japanese municipalities in 2008. The function is then theoretically derived by combining the supply and demand functions for local public services. Second, we employ the empirical results obtained to calculate the urban sprawl elasticity. The elasticity shows the percentage local marginal public costs run up by a 1% expansion in urban sprawl. The elasticity is estimated to range from -0.207 to 0.299. Third, we implement a cluster analysis to identify the municipalities where urban sprawl would lead to financial shortage in the future. We implement it for urban sprawl elasticity, financial capability indicator, ratio of children in the population, and ratio of elderly people in the population. Consequently, the municipalities of our concern would not only include numerous small local cities with weaker financial capability, but also some metropolises which we ever regarded as economically healthy cities. Whether compact city policy is essential for municipalities would depend on regional circumstances, regardless of administrative divisions.

　We analyzed the influence of urban compactness on property taxes per urban land area as well as municipal expenditure per capita. This was done by simulating the impact of policies that make cities compact on municipal expenditures and property tax revenue under future population decline and aging. As an indicator of urban compactness, we used the normalized standard distance. Our results show that municipalities with a high degree of urban compactness have a higher property tax per urban land area; moreover, there exists a degree of urban compactness that minimizes total expenditure per capita. In our simulation, a policy that maintains the same degree of urban compactness as the current policy is expected to improve revenues by 549 billion yen in the fiscal year 2030 and 1,226 billion yen in the fiscal year 2045. Furthermore, a policy that reduces the degree of urban compactness by 10% from the current one improves revenues by 1,703 billion yen in the fiscal year 2030 and 2,202 billion yen in the fiscal year 2045.

　In this paper, we analyze the relationship between local public accounting reform and local government expenditure behavior from FY2009 to FY2015.

　The purpose of this reform is to optimize and slim the public sector size by using the information from local government financial statements. In 2006, two local public accounting standards, "Standard model (Kijyun model in Japanese) " and "Modified model (Kaitei model in Japanese) " are offered by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication (MIC). From that time on, local public accounting reform has been vigorously promoted.

　By our empirical analysis using panel data regression, we obtained some key results. First, expenses for general administration and public works tend to be suppressed by introduction of the financial statements according to MIC’s local public accounting standards. Second, adopting "Standard model" and "Modified model" are more strongly related to suppression of those expenses than other types of financial statements. These results imply that making the financial statements by local governments leads to increasing transparency of budgetary procedures and optimizing the local government expenditure.

　In recent years, many Japanese people have called for reform of the local assembly. Local assembly members who have been commissioned by voters should make their comment based on campaign pledge. But some of them never give their opinion during their term, or some have asked local officials to prepare their scripts. Therefore, some people criticize the local council as a ‘school arts festival’. The construction of the local politics corpus is one of the effective ways to measure the degree of agreement between their election pledges and statement remarks in their assembly. However, the cost of building a local political corpus is very high.

　Recently, there is a movement to build a local political corpus in the field of natural language processing research. This is because the development of information and communication technology has facilitated automatic data collection. Open data policies are also being promoted.

　In this paper, we consider the current situation and issues of Japanese local corpora construction, and recommend improvement measures.

　This paper gives an overview of Evidence-Based Policy Making (EBPM) with a focus on the quality and quantity of evidence. Policy making in Japan has overlooked two types of evidence, i.e., evidence on the causal effect and on the effect size. The first type of evidence is about the quality. One can wrongly implement a policy that has a limited and/or undesirable effect if the quality of evidence that the policy relies on is very low. High-quality evidence can be derived using field experiments or pseudo-experimental methods such as the regression-discontinuity design. The second type of evidence is about the quantity. Computing the cost-effectiveness of policies is necessary to implement the most effective policies given the budget constraint. Finally, I argue that EBPM works only if the evidence is made and used in the open and transparent environment.