Probably no one dare deny that efficiency or, efficient resource allocation, is one of the most vital public values for policy-makers. Policies, however, are seldom efficient. ‘Government failures’ abound. Inefficiencies in public policies are classified broadly into two groups: those whose faults fall on the supply-side, and those which are imperfect on the demand-side. This essay examines each of these groups in turn.

Type 1 is X-inefficiency, which has its roots in the discrepancy between the attainable minimal marginal production cost and the supplier-perceived cost. Because government agencies are (1)monopolist, (2)free from bankruptcy, (3)with the disjunction between costs and revenues, (4)with difficulty in measuring output, X-inefficiency in the public sector is likely to become worse and more prolonged than that in the private sector. In addition to the internal and semi-internal efforts for the better management and better monitoring systems, a couple of radical measures for a small government (privatization, de-regulation, de-centralization) are indispensable.

Type 2 inefficiencies are likely to result when decision-makers or government agencies fail adequately to perceive costs (the sum of implementation costs and losses incurred by a given population) or benefits of a policy for society as a whole. To correct this type of inefficiency, (1)more participatory democracy, (2)more public spirits for leading political actors, (3)more active public-interest groups and political entrepreneurs, (4)easier access to government information, (5)a set of strategies to deal with risks and uncertainties, are badly in need.

Type 3 inefficiencies derive from the de-coupling between burdens and benefits. The policy demand is very often inflated when free-rides are easy. ‘More partisan mutual adjustment’ is of course an effective measure, but never panacea. Institutionalizing the balanced budget principle, which forbids the present generation from enjoying undue policy benefits at the sacrifice of future generations, is also strongly recommended.

When policy consumers lack enough information about policy benefits, or they are too self-centered with little concern for the welfare of other people, future generations, animals, inanimate beings like historical buildings, their policy demand tends to be lower than the socially optimal level. Thus result Type 3 inefficiencies. To be stressed in this respect is the need for policy designers to consciously pursue the possibility of preference launderings as an integral part of policy goals.

Environmental problems challenge the traditional idea that public policy is based on concern for citizens in the same political community in which policies are enacted. Environmental destruction adversely affects foreign peoples, future generations, and all other living things. We must therefore examine which categories of external parties ought to be taken into consideration in the policymaking process. The present article explores this question by critically examining existing theories in environmental ethics.

First, the suppositions of the discussion are enumerated. In a liberal democracy where citizens coexist and cooperate irrespective of the presence of conflicting visions of the good life, public policy is to be justified without relying on any one of these visions. In the light of this presupposition, Deep Ecology, a powerful ecocentric movement, fails as a paradigm for public policy for three reasons. First, Deep Ecology tends to overlook conflicts among human beings; second, the movement is a proponent of only one particular vision of good life; and third, that might violate individual rights. Animals and plants are considered merely instrumentally for human interests.

Next, the article argues that foreign peoples and future generations fall within policy considerations. After a critical examination of so-called lifeboat ethics, the article proposes two arguments regarding international concerns. The first is an argument derived from international justice. In this view, when the environment in one country is polluted by enterprises in another, the government of the latter country has a duty to compel the polluters compensate its victims. To protect the global environment from industrial and social activity in each country, governments should cooperate to develop a fair international scheme according to which every country shoulders the cost of environmental protection in proportion to the benefit from its past activity. The second argument presented is one of service assistance. Environmental aid is justified by a general principle stating that when a government cannot afford funds and skills for public service, other governments have an obligation to assist. Concern for future generations is justified neither by natural affection for our posterity nor by the rights of future people. Rather the principle of intergeneraional fairness is invoked, meaning that present generations, who received the natural heritage from past generations, have a duty to bestow the heritage on future generations.

Finally, a comprehensive system of continuously increasing environmental taxes is recommended. This system is intended to promote energy-productive innovation, to induce consumers to adopt an environment-conscious lifestyle, and to foster ecologically sound visions of the good life.

Local governments have developed and utilized the Pollution Countermeasures Agreement (PCA) in order to compensate for their lack of formal legal authority. By concluding a PCA with a local government, a company causing environmental pollution promises to take some measures to prevent the environmental pollution. Compared with regulation based on formal legal rules, the PCA has its own merits such as making it possible to take flexible countermeasures which are well-tailored for a particular company on case-by-case basis. But, in most cases, the agreement between a local government and a regulated company is in fact a “quasi-agreement” in the sense that the regulated company is forced to agree with a local government for fear of the collateral punishment by the local government using legal authorities in policy areas other than environmental protection or the pressure of local public opinion. Therefore, from the conventional legal point of view, the PCA is a questionable policy tool. Nevertheless, many local governments have used this questionable tool, because they have thought that the law is not sacred and inviolable norms but tools which may or may not be useful for the attainment of particular policy goals. According to this instrumental legal consciousness, it is legitimate for a local government to utilize legally questionable policy tools if legal measures are not suitable for particular urgent problems. Local policy making and implementation based on this instrumental legal consciousness shake inter-governmental relationship. The conventional vertical relationship in which the central government had strictly controlled local governments has been gradually replaced by horizontal relationship in which each local government creates its own normative order even if it may contradict with national legal order.

It is now the epoch of the earth environment. Governmental organizations, many municipalities promoting ecological reform and environmental NGO in Japan deal with global problems such as global warming. Now a confrontation is found between the government administration on the one side and self-governing bodies and NGO on the other side. The power of traditional political actors such as the national and local assemblies and political party declines step by step, because they are built in too deep by traditional interest groups and governmental bureaucracy. It is not easy that they escape from this structure.

In Europe and America, Green Party and environmental citizen’s movement have developed. As a result green politics occupied the important position in national and local assemblies and a political party. It can be to say adversely, that the political confrontation of environmental issues preceded assembly reform and modernization of the political party system. In Japan such “the new politics” was received instead of political institutions by several local administration and consumers cooperative organization. A progressive “local government” in particular becomes a leader of environmental policy. At first the measure of his environmental policy is being non-legal system of public nuisance prevention agreement with a corporation. Then, the measure becomes a legal form: the establishment of environmental basis regulations, which accept the participation of citizen in environmental administration. Local Assembly and a political party are passive on environmental issue. Only a few local assembly members, who have contacted with environmental movement, deal with environmental issue as main political ones.

But environmental issue needs to establish it as a new project of democracy, then the whole societies begin to change into the ecological life-world by various citizens’ participation. Such a challenge becomes an opportunity to reform Local Assembly and an antiquated faction system in an assembly. The new political party system must be different from a current system. A centralized political party of politicians becomes “local political party of citizen”. This new model of the political party is based on Network type organization and an idea of citizen sovereignty. A democracy turns into an interactive democracy from representative democracy. It consists of interactivity of the citizen’s political organization and institution such as local government, local assembly with local party system, direct democracy of referendum, NPO / NGO etc

Japanese environmental sociologists have stressed that environmental sociology should be mainly sociology of environmental problems. Typically they focus on victims of industrial, noise and air pollution in local community. But now we should shift to environmental policy studies, especially on global climate change protection in collaboration with environmental economics and law study. In contrast with spiked tire pollution in northern snow area, 1980’s., global warming issue is difficult to deal with because it is neither visible nor easily sensed as a problem by the average citizen. Behind the Japanese government’s proposal on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is the Ministry of International Trade and Industry’s latent desire to build new nuclear power plants. But the global trend is away from nuclear power. A major shift toward the development of renewable energy sources and energy conservation technologies is desirable.

1) As 4 big energy (petroleum, natural gas, coal and nuclear) penetrates the present civilization, usual energy policy should also take the importing energy interruption into considerations. 2) Energy-related environment destructions have expanded from productions and transportations to consumption and disposals of the energy. The measures against these destructions also have expanded internationally. 3) It is so long between happenings of destructions, inquiring of it , enforcement of the measures that we are unable to get the sound environmental recovery quickly. 4) Basically the cause of late policy for protecting the environments has been made by “Japanese-styled corporative society (JSCS)”. JSCS , that was necessary for an urgent reconstruction from the devastated Japan land , was composed of the profit-maximum attitude of the corporations , employee and its families tightly-binded to corporations for long time employment , MPs and bureaucrats complied with the profit-max. and no NGO. 5)Energy-related environmental problems towards 21st century is the automobile congestions and nuclear power stations. Automobile-favored traffic should be transformed into sound ones by increasing the cost of owning a car. Unless reduction of the high-lebel radioactive disposables and safety operation of nuclear power plants is realized by 2010, non will be nuclear future.

Industrial pollution in Japan to date has unfortunately damaged the health of many people, but it has been overcome in a comparatively short period of time through the efforts of public and private sectors.

Thus Japan has made great efforts in the battle against industrial pollution. We have tried a variety of measures concerning air and water pollution problems that may arise in any country at any time. I believe that other countries, particularly developing countries can adopt more effective policy measures for pollution control by shaving our experiences.

As described in Agenda 21, serious circumstances pose a particularly difficult challenge to developing countries that are in the midst of rapid growth. These countries must simultaneously tackle global-scale environmental issues as well as domestic problems.

The duties and responsibilities of national bodies, especially “Ministry of Environment” in the near future, as the entities to promote initiatives for environmental conservation will be greater. We intend to strive actively to promote the environmental administration and international cooperation to leave our beautiful planet for coming generations.

The term ‘decentralization’ is popular but imprecise. In Japan decentralizations not the local ‘government reforms’ nor the process of making ‘policy system’ in the local government. The decentralization and the local government reforms mean only rearrangements of project management and operational management systems of local governments.

This article argues that local governments must have the responsibilities of making, implementing, evaluating policies or programs, besides the financial abilities. Without the responsibilities, local government reforms will fail. The key to be ‘good governance’ for local governments is to take the responsibilities.

To reform the role of state, it is necessary to examine it’s features in that country. For example, the situation that the state and the society have been mutually penetrating in Japan requires the redefinition of their relationship in the case of deregulation. Bureaucracy which represents Japanese state has two special features; one is a sectionalism and the other is an expansionism. Based on this combination, each ministry/agency secures its turf by dividing the whole society and can intervene social activity in it. Corresponding with to entrust societal groups with the implementation, bureaucracy in Japan has been absorbing social demand for policy through these collaborative groups. That means Japanese government has vast amount of semi-public organizations and expands its functions. Through these groups and its own unclear competence, bureaucrats control societal actors to some extent. Therefore to promote deregulation, separation of sate and society will be a key-element, and it is necessary to make state functions clear. As Japanese state - society relation affects the nature of markets, the change of that relation will be required for improving market competition.

Recently it is discussed about Tax harmonaization in EU Community.This problem relates to the achievement of an efficient allocation of resources within the Community. We will apply a kind of this theory to our country. Accordingly , main purpose of this report is to surmarize the redistribution of income tax among central and rocal government in japan today, and to appriciate its effect. That redestribution of tax and resources is, also, the necessary reconstruction for the Decentralization Reform of Intergovernmental relations. It is the same process with the estabishment in accountability of the government. In such case, they have to put finger on some conditions. First,we are carring out The Finance Structure Reform in this era . Secondly, there are an excessive historical tendency towads equality in tax rate in this nation , for instance, you can see at the municipality inhabitant tax. And thirdly, people has decleared that they could not trust their government and its own tax systems.

To establish the accountability of local government, we must expand the independent revenue sources of municipalities. For that purpose, as an idea, to change the receiving body (they have to recieve allocation tax each fiscal year,as a result from shortage of general income resources) into the non receiving body. Let us supose that the financial capbility index of whole cities in Niigata Prefecture were raised by 0.5. Then, 14 cities from among 21 cities changed into non receivable bodies. For that purpose we have to convert each allocation tax to general municipality local tax. Though, to conversion allocation tax to local tax is not enough for saving cities from receivable bodies. It is necessary that those cities recieve additional general income resources. That additional income resources will be acceptable by the horizontal intergovernmental financial adjustment.

In other two simulation cases, it is pointed that the same horizontal adjustment system is necessary. The vertical adjustment system of finance is to be reinforced by the horizontal one, and converses are also true.

Over the last twenty years, numerous policy initiatives have been developed in Japan in response to evolving information technology and global informatization. The purpose of the article is to provide a brief description of the information management policy in the Japanese government and discuss its problems.

In the first place, I propose two classificatory criteria for the governance structure of information management: centralization versus decentralization, and concentration versus diffusion. According to the criteria, the Japanese governance structure is an example of the decentralization-diffusion type, which can be characterized by a lack of coordinating authorities across agencies, and the tendency to assign functions of implementation to each of agencies with relatively high degree of autonomy. The problems to which this type of governance may lead are as follows: duplication of information in government agencies, difficulty in standardization of such basic items as data-codes and data-definition, and difficulty in sharing information among agencies.

The Japanese government has realized these problems thoroughly and has been trying to settle them mainly as part of the administrative reforms since the 1970s. A general review of the reforms bearing upon information management in the Japanese government reveals that a series of reforms has been made. Reforms, such as the “Kasumigaseki-WAN (Wide-Area Network)” interconnecting LANs of ministries or agencies, the establishment of databases for common use, “one-stop service” to facilitate application or notification using information technology, have been conducted mainly on the premise that it is the introduction of new technology that can solve problems in information management. I use the term “technological determinism” to refer to such way of thinking. It is possible that technology, especially information technology (IT), may have certain impact on organizations of and services by government on a long term basis. Technological determinism, however, has several drawbacks, the most noteworthy of which is to replace “informatization as a means” with “informatization as an end in itself”. IT is not sufficient, while still necessary, to improve information management in government and furthermore to abolish bureaucratic red tape. I suggest that it is the reform of institutions that matters most, and conclude by offering suggestions for improvements in the information management in the Japanese government.

This article describes the reforms to the evaluative function of local government in Mie prefecture that have been introduced since 1995. It reviews the development of program evaluation in the United States, then analyses the relation between Mie’s system and the theory of program evaluation. Some tentative suggestions are made regarding the messages drawn from the Mie experience that are relevant to the reforms of other local governments in Japan.

In order to improve the quality of public policy, we need to analyze not only policy contents, but also political systems. We must investigate how to design political systems. From this point of view, public choice theory seems a very useful clue for us, because it offers a consistent model of institutional design. According to this theory, “political market” is essentially inefficient because of its institutional nature. So we need some constraints on it, especially constitutional rules. We can suppress inefficient policy outputs by those constraints. However, we find some problems in this theory. First, “political market” may not be so inefficient as public choice theorists insist. Second, those constraints may bring some secondary social costs. For example, vested interests could be more influential because those constraints would decrease influence of general people too. Or they might increase burden for courts because many political groups would step into courts to realize their claims. Third, and most significantly, public choice theory does not pay attention to political values, especially participation and deliberation. We must consider political values for designing political systems because they will improve public policy greatly. We can refine and launder our preferences through participation and deliberation.

The Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 revealed a variety of faults in the Japanese emergency management system for natural hazards. A lot of recommendations from scholars and practitioners were adopted in the improvement of this system. The aim of this article is to analyze the structure of failures in the Japanese emergency management policy. In this area, a loose policy network has been created by the Disaster Countermeasures Basic Act of 1969. This network is composed of three types of policy community; (a) meta-community of the Cabinet, (b) core-community of the Disaster Prevention Bureau of National Land Agency and offices responsible for this policy in the prefectural and municipal governments, (c) the established policy communities among the departments of the national government and local governments in other policy areas. In addition, citizens, private companies, and non-profit-organizations play very siginificant role. Most of the failures stem from the following three reasons: (1)inability of the Cabinet to coordinate policies, (2)lack of relevant resources in the core-community, and (3)exclusion of citizen’s groups from the policy network. We should review the Basic Act in order to change this structure.

This study investigates the policy making process of the Long-Term Care Insurance which will massively restructure the way health and welfare services are provided for frail elderly. By specifically looking at the process in which policy makers came to share the goals of the new program, this study shows that the policy learning through the interaction between the Ministry of Health and Welfare officials, related interest groups, and specialized politicians played a substantial role in designing the fundamentals of elderly care. By implication, we need an analytical framework of cross-national comparison, which takes into account not only the variation in terms of state and administrative structure, but also the political climate given the institutional constraints, as well as the shared policy ideas among specialists.

Recently, the argument about multiculturalism is increasing its importance more and more. This paper intends to examine it critically and find the way we should choose in the near future.

From theoretical point of view, multiculturalism will be placed at the middle of Liberalism and Communitarianism. Above all, for example, C. Taylor’s “the politics of difference” tends toward Communitarianism. This paper intends to show that such kind of multiculturalism involves a certain type of relativism, which does not adequately estimate but overestimates the incommensurability between one culture and another.

We think this relativist tendency stems from considering the cultural identity as something essentialist. Such cultural relativism turns groups into crowds, and causes absolute in-toleration toward the other culture and absolute toleration toward “collective purpose” among their own culture. In fact, like the case of the Affirmative Actions in the United States, the policy involving such relativism seems to have cause unfortunate friction between one and another.

We must re-grasp the identity to abandon this troublesome aspect of multiculturalism. Essentially, the identity should contextually change in various condition of dialogue. If one group’s identity had been politically recognized or fixed as such by public government, they would be confusing public and private matters, and each person’s identities would have been treated inadequately. Limitless public recognition of collective purpose may cause dangerous nationalism. In order to keep both diversity and mutual understanding among cultures in the future, we must ease the incommensurability between one culture and another and elaborate a plan of constructing the truly public and dialogical space now.

In order to improve the quality of public policy, we need to analyze not only policy contents, but also political systems. We must investigate how to design political systems. From this point of view, public choice theory seems a very useful clue for us, because it offers a consistent model of institutional design. According to this theory, “political market” is essentially inefficient because of its institutional nature. So we need some constraints on it, especially constitutional rules. We can suppress inefficient policy outputs by those constraints. However, we find some problems in this theory. First, “political market” may not be so inefficient as public choice theorists insist. Second, those constraints may bring some secondary social costs. For example, vested interests could be more influential because those constraints would decrease influence of general people too. Or they might increase burden for courts because many political groups would step into courts to realize their claims. Third, and most significantly, public choice theory does not pay attention to political values, especially participation and deliberation. We must consider political values for designing political systems because they will improve public policy greatly. We can refine and launder our preferences through participation and deliberation.