I have constructed a database of all the 7792 bills proposed by the government from the first session of the Diet in 1947 to the 144th session in 1998. I make out new indices, “schedule scale” and “schedule scale interval” in order to include bills carried over to the next session or proposed to the extraordinary session, which previous works omitted. I analyze averages of some variables of each period between general elections successively, so as to show not so much short trend as long trend of legislative process.

Around 1970, period of deliberation, such as that from proposition to passage, was prolonged for oppositions to delay deliberation, kill bills and annoy the government, while frequency of discussion in committee decreased. That is, Japanese legislative process is characterized by “long deliberation without discussion.” Contrary to expectation, it is not established in 1955 when Liberal Democratic Party Government started and the Diet Law was amended on the major points, much less in 1947 when the Diet began. Indeed, it was formulated historically and consolidated around 1970 as an equilibrium between government and opposition.Besides, after coalition governments came about since 1993, period of deliberation was lengthened much more and frequency of discussion became less active so that “long deliberation without discussion” exacerbates.As for reform of the Diet, I consider the Diet as “a deliberative arena,” referring to deliberative democracy theory.

“Evaluation of public administration” or “policy evaluation” is now one of critical matter in Japan, especially to municipalities (basic local governments), which provide basic public services for citizens. Most municipalities are, however, in confusion at introducing evaluation system, because they do not know which system is appropriate to their situation.

Therefore this paper discusses some theoretical matters and suggests a new evaluation system appropriate to municipalities with 8 steps.

Strengthening of policy evaluation is an innovative element of the current administrative reform in the Japanese central government. The reform aims at transforming planning and procedure oriented management into result oriented management. However, it is still unclear about the interrelation between internal and external controls including auditing and evaluation, since the focus is internal evaluation. It is also vague in the evaluating targets and the compatibility between ensuring accountability and improving efficiency and quality of service. On the other hand, government audits in the developed countries have generally moved their manpower from traditional compliance auditing into performance or policy evaluation since the 1980s. The Board of Audit in Japan is not exceptional. Also it is noteworthy that government audits would play an additional (partly original) role in certificating the performance indicators (PIs) under the new public management (NPM) which has recently influenced the Japanese public sector reforms. It is assumed that PIs are considered the mediating signals corresponding to the prices in the competitive market between the public as customers and service providers as suppliers , and monitoring evaluation plays a significant role; market mechanism could function when there is the symmetry of information between customers or consumers and suppliers. However, internal evaluation might not examine the merits of policy objectives or the policy framework. Therefore, it is necessary for successful reform that government auditing implements the complementary evaluation on these areas in addition to examining the monitoring evaluation of government agencies, while the approach is not easy because of its political neutrality.

The administrative reforms which Mie Prefecture has striven to implement since 1995 include unprecedented efforts towards introducing a project performance evaluation system into core administration policies not involving methods of reform used in previous years. The author has been involved with these efforts in a position of responsibility in administrative affairs since their inception.

In this manuscript, the author, by following from within the Mie Prefectural Government the progress of the introduction of the project performance evaluation system, first clarifies the conflicts that exist among bureaucratic organizations such as a government body consisting both of employees who resist the introduction of such a system and those who make reform efforts on their own. The author also discusses the subject of the phases of development that should be followed in the evolution of the system and the concerns of “reform-minded offices”, and touches upon the necessary foundation for making effective practical policy evaluation.

Within this foundation is, first, the existence of a leader with faith in such a system. Second is the inherent ability for change latent within bureaucratic organizations-an inherent ability for such a system in administrative affairs. In this manuscript the author considers how to foster this ability for change without crushing it, and contends that the effectiveness of policy evaluation can not be excepted without the improvement of current conditions within bureaucratic organizations.

were generally reputed to lack strong leadership. Many commentators agree that these shortcomings come not only from politician’s personal impotence or cultural backgrounds but from legal arrangements governing functions of Cabinet and prime minister.

Cabinets under the Meiji Constitution were provided with legal instruments arranged to help make a Cabinet less centripetal. First, to make any political decision, a prime minister was required to gain a unanimous vote of ministers of state. That practically meant that each single minister was able to destroy the integrity of the Cabinet and to force it to resign en bloc. Army ministers made extensive use of this veto to build a new Cabinet which looked better to army officers. Second, a Cabinet was, as a rule, made of ministers each of whom was in charge of an administrative department. A minister usually worked more as an agent of his department than as a statesman sharing responsibilities for leading entire national politics.

Institutional arrangements changed drastically under the post-war constitutional law. First, though a prime minister still needs a unanimous vote of the Cabinet, she is authorized by the Constitution to fire dissenting ministers. Established practice encourages a dissenting minister to resign or, if he chooses to remain in the Cabinet, to behave as if he followed prime minister’s line. Second, a prime minister is further authorized by the Constitution to instruct a minister (namely, his administrative agency) to do or not to do something. This power greatly helps a prime minister control ministers working centrifugally.

A prime minister has never been more powerful than nowadays. Virtually no conceivable legal arrangements could make her more powerful and efficient as long as Japan sticks to the parliamentary cabinet system. Nevertheless people never stop complaining of deficiency of prime ministerial leadership and a lot of empowering plans have been proposed. But legal status of the prime minister does not seem to be responsible. Considering relatively comfortable achievements of some Cabinets, the most likely answer is that this deficiency problem is just a pseudo one.

The aim of this paper is to empirically evaluate the outcome of the Large Store Act. The Act has been locked into Japanese retail industry from 1974 to now and has controlled the location of large stores and their size in order to protect business of small or medium shops. But the policy outcome of the Act should be evaluated by statistical evidences. This paper tries to calibrate the policy effects of the Act with time series data and cross-section spatial data. The empirical evidences show us that the Large Store Act fails to perform the objectives in the long run. The main reason is illustrated by the continuously decreasing of the number of small or medium shops, and second reason is focused the low financial performances of large retail firms. The act may force almost commercial areas to be deteriorate. The lesson should be utilized when we demand new retail policy to modify the confused situation.

The main purpose of this paper is to focus on the economic distortion caused by the malapportionment of representatives and to search for a way to eradicate such distortion. An interesting conclusion is that amendment of the apportionment of representatives is desirable even for the people who will end up with fewer representatives. This paper suggests that people who protect their benefits by political pressure may increase their own welfare level by unilaterally throwing away their excess political power. This chapter also suggests that promoting the movement of people from subsidized agricultural areas to cities will raise welfare levels. This is different from the “common sense view” in Japan. However, if we postulate that the low labor productivity of Japanese agriculture is attributable to overpopulation in rural areas. And that congestion in city areas reflects the scarcity of social capital (i.e. infrastructure financed by government), it may not seem so strange.

In this paper, we follow the same politico-economic model presented in Nagamine(1998) which analyzes regional allocation of public investment, and extend the previous empirical analysis with respect to road investment at the prefecture level, considering some new viewpoints. Our model is the positive and empirical one which could contain several policy purposes of public investment, namely allocation policy, distribution policy and macro policy, and also consider influences from the political process. The first viewpoint is to distinguish a national road investment from a local one and to suppose the different allocation mechanism between them. The second is to consider the possible correlation between road investment and local construction companies as a political factor. The third is also to consider how national bureaucrats sent to a local government could help to pull road development projects or grants to a local area where they are sent.

The empirical results show subtle different factors deciding national road investments and local road investments. About national investments, the central bureau considers the needs for roads from each prefecture, and at the same time invests relatively more for the country area compared with the urban area. About local investments, the simultaneous framework of a road investment and a grant for it was supported. It shows that a per capita national grant reflects both a demand for road from each area and a interregional distributive consideration. About the influences from politicians, central bureaucrats and construction companies, it shows some interesting and significant results, but requires more analyses to get a confident conclusion.

The concept of ‘biotop’ is an area where the natural ecosystem functions so that wildlife are able to survive. Now, Japanese conservation law is defective regarding ecosystem conservation, and there is no conservation law for secondary nature of rural districts or farm villages, for example copses which are destroyed their natural environment, etc. Some copses that are worthy, are conserved by the National Trust, but many others cannot be protected because of a lack of funds. Therefore, I suggest ‘biotop regulation’ which regulates some areas as conservation zones, or being needed permission to develop more than a set of the scale. Municipalities can establish ‘biotop regulation’, because some biotop areas are small. An index of areas regulated is copses, etc. The characteristic species live in the land ecosystem or endangered species do so. The regulated areas should be reducted taxes or be exempted. Areas which are necessary to manage actively by agreement will be able to be concluded with landowners and landtrusts, and so on. Establishment of ‘biotop regulation’ is useful for biotop conservation. We should develop it to keep an ecosystem for wildlife.

As well known, it is the neo-classical economics characterized by the contrastive market view to the Keynesian economics and the yet more thoroughgoing anti-Keynesians such as F. A. Hayek or M. Friedman that have been theoretically underpinning the deregulation policies since 1980s. On the basis of the logic of self-regulating market, they severely limit the functions of government. We call their standpoint the Market Foundationalism. This ideology, although broadly accepted at present, has theoretical flaws; the optimism about market failures and the implicit assumption of the Say’s law. Because of these flaws, the Market Foundationalism can not be an adequate guiding principle to the future deregulation policies. This paper is an attempt to explore the right direction of the future deregulation policies thorough the clarification of the flaws of the Market Foundationalism.

The electricity supply industry, all sectors of which were considered to be a natural monopoly until very recently, is being reformed in Japan. Its power generation sector was liberalized in 1995 and the introduction of competition into end-user supply sector has been discussed. A new access to the electricity industry has been tried, industry which now features both wide regulation from the authorities and deep protection through ‘regional monopoly’ and a ‘rate-of-return’ systems.

Even after the regulatory reform of this sector, improved efficiency must not jeopardize public objectives, i.e., universal service, security of supply, energy security and environmental effects. That is, regulatory reform must not be the one to preclude renewable energy and nuclear power generation which are implicated in global warming.

The deregulation of the electricity sector is to ‘maximize the self-management of electric power companies’ and to ‘minimize administrative interventions’. Regional electricity companies should improve efficiency to become ‘common companies’ through market evaluation, and keeping end-users’ benefits.

Taking these points into consideration, Japan should bring the grid access model as the model of competition-the owner of the grid must allow competitors to use it, on non-discriminatory terms and prices.

Keeping three public objectives-security of supply, reduced prices, and social equity -is required to the electricity sector, and the government should show a clear policy about these public objectives, considering the uniqueness of Japan that has few energy resources.

Under these conditions, regional electricity companies are needed to be competitive with independent power producers (IPP) and a system where end-users can choose the producers by themselves must be established.

This paper aims to clarify the coordination between the fiscal and monetary policy authorities as well as the features of open market operations by the monetary policy authority in the government’s issuing of more bonds. At first, to investigate the climate of the secondary market and the movement of the central bank, I have come up with the following three cases; (1) the case in which there is no effect of the government bonds,(2) the case in which the monetary authority has priority in coping with a temporal increase of the interest rate on government bonds, (3) the case in which the fiscal policy authority has priority in adjusting the situation against the concern that the continuous creation of public debt may cause crowding out and inflation. Secondly I conducted the tests with Granger causality tests and impulse response function. The results are as follows; (1) The monetary authority could adjust the volume of government bonds in the secondary market. In fact, however, it is the fiscal authority that could reduce the rate of interest on government bonds, adjusting the level of the prices effectively. Moreover, though the tests didn’t find crowding out, the shortage of resources for the fiscal policy authority’s purchasing and underwriting government bonds is expected to lead to crowding out. (2) I reached the conclusion that the fiscal authority’s underwriting bonds would increase the price level without the increase of base money. These two observations show that the factors of crowding out and inflation are already involved in Japan due to the cumulative deficits. Therefore, I assert that neither the central bank’s underwriting government bonds nor creating expectation of inflation is appropriate to today’s Japanese economy, even though Japan is in a depressing situation due to the collapse of the “bubble economy”.

Public policy evaluation subsumes ex ante policy analysis (policy analysis), ex post policy analysis (program evaluation), performance measurement and implementation assessment. From a survey of the improvement process of Mie prefecture’s performance measurement system, and review of the extant literatures on public policy evaluation, this article explores the question: “Is to make a policy choice based on performance measurement appropriate?” Almost literatures contend that policy analysis and performance measurement are completely different because the policy analysis makes cause and effect relation clear whereas the performance measurement is not to do it. Therefore, using performance measurement as the substitution of policy analysis is not appropriate. But this article calls for father inquiry on the foundation to make ex ante and ex post policy analysis.

About theoretical models of policy process model, policy scientists have pointed out the importance of adopting the viewpoints of the roles of analytical knowledge in public policy making since 70’s. In Japan, the importance of analyzing policy process by theoretical models has been recognized, but the concepts of explaining the dynamics of policy process, such as policy-oriented learning, has not been always noticed.

From the aspect of knowledge utilization, two roles of policy analysis in public policy making has been pointed out; “enlightenment” and “advocate”. Paul A. Sabatier and Hank C. Jenkins-Smith adopted these roles in theoretical model (advocacy coalition framework; ACF). And they also presented the concept of policy-oriented learning; changing the belief system which influenced the thinking and actions of political actors.

This paper uses “critical case-study” method and selects the deregulation of airline in Japan and America as “critical case”. We take the focus of three phases of policy process of both cases; “setting the issue of deregulation”, “policy argument”, and “enactment of the legislation of deregulation”. And, in these phases, we consider the policy-oriented learning between two competing groups, “deregulation promoting group” and “vested interest rights sustaining group”.

According to results of case study, we point out that not only the changes of conditions of social economy and institutions but policy-oriented learning in policy subsystem effects policy changes. But also we point out that the concept of policy oriented learning should be modified from two points; “short-term policy changes which policy-oriented learning brings about” and “factors which cause the policy-oriented learning between competing groups”.

There have been many empirical studies which focus on reimbursement systems of health care insurance. However, most of them adopt macro economic approach but micro especially in Japan. Little of published research examines the behavior of health care providers such as hospitals and doctors and service purchasers in Japan.

This paper mainly examines the effect of penetration of Managed Care and the changes of reimbursement systems since 1980s in the U.S. through systematic review of earlier researches.

The objects of this paper are as follows; first of all, the author tried to show the structure of public works project in Japan in terms of ‘nature of public welfare’ on the public policies. Because other studies have been evaluated in the point view of their needs and object traditionally until now, this paper is concentrated on the nature of public welfare in the public works project as an example of public policies. Second, this paper tried to reveal the contents and characteristics of ‘nature of public welfare’ by the way of a case study on the analysis of the government-owned land reclamation by drainage in Isahaya. The method of this study is as follows; first of all, the author deales in debates on the concept of ‘nature of public welfare’. And then, the author set the hypothesis of this study resulted from this. Hypothesis of this paper is to reveal in practice 4 aspects of nature of public welfare and to evaluate them, that is, procedural, in time, regional, and essential one.

Plot of this paper is consisted of five chapters. First of all, chapter 2 covers the concept of ‘nature of public welfare’ in the public works project as an example of governments’ public policies. And then, the author analyzes evaluated the structure and characteristics of public works project in Japan. Their practical procedure is as follows; once they are enrolled in laws, they have been changed in by the way of social needs and from time to time. Second, in chapter 3 the author analyzed the ‘nature of public welfare ‘ of them , concentrated on land reclamation by drainage in Isahaya, Nagasaki prefecture. This project was started in 1952 by prefectural governor of Nagasaki, its initial object was making a large rice field through land reclamation by drainage. In the meanwhile, its object was changed into prevention of natural disasters, and then its budget is enlarged about by double. Therefore, the author tried to show objects and cost/benefit analysis of this works . Next, in chapter 4 the author try to probe to have 4 characteristics of nature of public welfare, especially concentrated on 4 aspects of nature of public welfare by the way of case study in Isahaya. Finally, in chapter 5 the author concluded in demanding to reconsider the ‘nature of public welfare’ in the public works project in Japan through case study on the Isahaya.

Despite the growth of recognition about the function of parliamentary control of the executive, the discussion of this function has been confusing. One of the reasons is the lack of appropriate understanding about this function among Members of Diet and the media. Therefore, this study attempts to design the institution of parliamentary control of the executive based on the theory of institutional design by showing the proper perspective to understand this function.

In consequence of some considerations, the following institutional alternatives are prepared:

(1)introducing the procedure of inquiry for minorities.

(2)increasing the time of deliberation for scrutiny on the activity of government.

(3)preparing the procedure for written question.

This paper argues that these policy changes by the Environmental Agency can be explained by Political Opportunity Structure (POS) of the Environmental Agency. POS is devised by sociologist to explain social movement influence, but this paper analyzes the Environmental Agency’s POS. The POS emphasizes how and when the Environmental Agency acquires resources external to one. It consists of three components: (1) unity between MITI and business circles, (2) the role of parties, (3) the possibility of alliance. The opening in POS supports the Environmental Agency to establish new environmental policies.

This hypothesis is proved by a case study of decision–making process of an environmental assessment bill in 1997. The Environmental Agency failed to legislate for an environmental assessment from 1973 to 1982. But environmental bureaucrats succeeded in passing the environmental assessment bill in 1997. Why? First, Keidanren (Japan Federation of Economic organizations) and Denki–Jigyo–Rengou–Kai (The Federation of Electric Power Companies) opposed MITI which attempted to draw up an environmental assessment bill for itself(unity between MITI and economic circles). Second, the Ministry of Construction gave support to the environmental assessment bill drew up by the Environmental Agency, and actually aligned with environmental bureaucrats (the possibility of alliance). Third, prime minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who had been interested in environmental problems, provided his political leadership for the Environmental Agency’s bill, and settled the battle over turf between MITI and the Environmental Agency (the role of parties). Fourth, a coalition cabinet, which was consisted of by Liberal Democratic Party, Social Democratic Party and Sakigake, regarded the Environmental Agency’s bill as glue for strengthening the party coalition, and approved the bill (the role of parties).