Following Paris agreement, the Japanese government has asked local municipalities to formulate a ‘Decarbonization plan’.　In order to build up an effective action plan, it is necessary to clarify energy supply and demand structure in a regional scale.　However, the official statistics of energy data which is the basis of understanding the regional energy structure is not sufficiently organized at the municipal scale in Japan.　Therefore, in this research, we aim to suggest the way to clarify regional energy supply and demand structure through drawing energy flow charts.

　　Moreover, we also analyze changes in regional energy system introducing renewable energy resources and evaluate their impacts on carbon emissions reduction and improvement of energy system efficiency on data analysis.　These data set has been collected from the operational characteristics of smart community projects underway in Miyako city, Iwate prefecture.　A smart community aims an innovative energy system introducing ICTs to improve efficiencies as well as QOL.　In the project, electricity generated from 4 MW PV plants is supplied to the customer facilities through the integration by CEMS （Community Energy Management System）.　The accumulated data from smart meters and the EMS （Energy Management System） is also used in the analysis.

JEL Classification:R58

　　In evaluating transport improvement, Japan’s cost-benefit analysis only calculates user benefit.　On the other side, not only user benefit but also external effect which is generally called “wider economic benefit” is used in UK cost-benefit guidance.

　　In the case of measuring external effects for transport improvement, spatial computable general equilibrium analysis （CGE） is generally applied in Japan, but the UK guidance proposes a simple formula is applied to calculate external effect not including user benefit.

　　This paper shows that the UK guidance measuring the external effect is consistent with the theoretical general equilibrium approach.

　　Comparing simple calculation by wider benefit formula and calculation by CGE method, the simple calculation is sufficient to apply in an empirical analysis.　This paper proposes a simple and applicable method for measuring external effects in transport improvement project.

　　However, there are cautions in the apply simple formula for calculating wider economic benefit.　It is necessary to pay attention to what external effects are considered.　For example, in case of technical external effect, agglomeration effects are formulated by accessibility function.　And increasing output effect is not appeared.

　　In case of monetary external effect are considered, agglomeration effects are formulated by regional migration function.　And an increasing output effect is appeared because of imperfect market.

JEL Classifications:R13, R23, R40

　　Vietnam has recorded remarkable economic growth in recent years that is driven by buoyant export performance—one of the strongest among South East Asian Countries.　In tandem with greater integration of the global economy, external vulnerabilities have elevated.　Improvement of the macroeconomic policy framework is required to consolidate a sound macroeconomic foundation for stable and resilient growth in the mid- and long-run.

　　To ensure fiscal sustainability, the government has established a statutory public debt ceiling of 65% of the Gross Domestic Product （GDP）, which includes public debt guarantees by the 2017 Law on Public Debt Management.　Public debt per GDP is on a path of reduction because of fiscal consolidation efforts in recent years.　More efforts warrant widening fiscal space to ensure stable growth during the mid-term, while addressing unexpected external shocks.

　　Results of debt sustainability analysis implied that a sound fiscal consolidation strategy is required to stabilize the public debt ratio per GDP and half the primary deficit from the current level.　Going forward, to sustain growth in the long run, Vietnam needs to promote infrastructure development and to allocate public funds to human capital development such as education and vocational training.　In addition, the pressure on fiscal expenditures is expected to increase for strengthening social protection with the progress of the rapid ageing of Vietnam.

　　To promote fiscal consolidation, a set of measures aiming to increase tax revenue is required with prioritization and streamlining of overlapping tax incentives for investment promotion as well as enhancement of tax collection capacity in the informal sector activities.　On the expenditure side, reform on the public governance, including streamlining the overlapped functions across the government and ensuring transparency of government procurements needs to be prioritised.　Additionally, strengthening corporate governance of state-owned enterprises is necessary to reduce the risk of contingent liabilities.

JEL Classifications:H68, H63, H2, H50

　　Research on climate change mainly focuses on detecting whether the climate is actually changing and if so, detecting possible causes of such change.　Climate models, constructed on laws of physics, have played a central role in detection and attribution of climate change.　To accomplish those goals, simulation experiments based on climate models are intensively conducted.　In simulation experiments, how accurate climate models can reproduce internal natural variability is of importance.　Moreover, the model outcome is sensitive to initial values due to the chaotic nature of the model.　To alleviate sensitivity with respect to initial values, ensemble experiments are performed with the cost of computational burden.

　　Climate econometrics, on the other hand, has attracted much attention in recent years where statistical models are built through statistical properties of observed climate variables in conjunction with the physical laws in order to capture a causal relationship between external drivers of the climate and the observed data.　Climate econometrics has an advantage in that it can avoid problems arisen from simulation experiments.　In climate econometrics, climate models expressed by differential equation system, such as energy balance model which describe the relationship between temperature and radiative forcing, are transformed into statistical models.　The past literature shows that the stochastic energy balance model constructed by adding noise term to energy balance model is equivalent to a vector error correction model under a certain assumption of statistical properties of the time series of climate variables.

　　In this article, our aim is to re-investigate statistical properties, in particular, the stationarity of the extended time series of climate variables.　This is important because the way the statistical model is constructed is different whether the data are generated by stationary processes or not.　Our major finding is that the earth’s surface temperature anomaly is detected non-stationary with a stochastic trend, which is in contrast to the finding in the past literature.　This may lead to an incompatibility with the physical theory based statistical model of the climate.　Our result indicates that data-driven statistical models can reject the relationships between climate variables deduced from physical laws that the past literature assumes.　This implies that the validity of restrictions the past literature of climate econometrics imposes a priori must be statistically tested.

JEL Classifications:Q54, C32, C51

　　Regional sustainability is an urgent issue in Japan, where population decline is rapidly progressing.　An area cannot be maintained without urban facilities that support various activities.　It is very difficult for an area with a population decline to maintain urban facilities because of the insufficient budget.　However, needless to say, a budget is required to maintain urban facilities, but citizens’ understanding and cooperation are also important.　For example, in order to maintain a waste disposal system, it is necessary for people to properly separate garbage and make efforts to reduce waste.　Furthermore, it is necessary to provide a budget for maintaining the system from waste collection to the final disposal.　These are maintained by the understanding and cooperation of citizens who are the waste generators, taxpayers, voters involved in decision-making, and finally as residents accepting facility locations that are often regarded as so-called nuisance facilities.　Urban facilities have multi-functions.　They have not only their original functions but also wider functions, which are significantly important for the community, such as symbolizing the wisdom and hardship of the ancestors, cultural assets and local characteristic features. They make up the local landscape and convey the local memories.　The questionnaire surveys of water treatment facilities and waste treatment facilities showed that many of them play an educational role in the area.　There is a significant correlation between these functions and the amount of effort and the number of collaborations.　We think that urban facilities have museum-like functions.　The sustainability of the region, including population migration, population composition, and socio-economic activities, depends on “people”.　Urban facilities contribute to the sustainability of the community through efforts to work on “people” in addition to their original functions.　The significance of the museum-like functions of city facilities is as follows.　The first is the role of disaster prevention education and environmental education for a wide range of citizens.　The second is to convey local memories and lessons learned from ancestors and history. The third role is to provide a place for communication between citizens and city facility managers.　Education is emphasized in some sustainability assessment, indicators such as the SDGs, but the evaluation index is based only on school education.　The contribution of urban facilities to local sustainability should be appropriately assessed by sustainability indicators.　We need to consider assessing the contribution of urban facilities to local sustainability through museum-like functions.

JEL Classifications:H41, H49, I29

　　This paper considers whether the employment opportunities of Korean workers were reduced because of the acceptance of foreign workers at the time when business conditions in the shipbuilding industry began to deteriorate in 2015.　An examination of the situation clarified three points.

　　First, it is not possible to confirm that the number of Korean workers decreased significantly in the shipbuilding industry.　The recession in this industry deepened from 2015 to 2017.　During this time, the number of workers employed by shipbuilding companies fell by 53.9%.　The rate of decline in the number of foreign workers was 48.8%, while the rate for Korean workers was 54.3%.　The number of foreign workers also decreased significantly.　Moreover, there was no movement by shipbuilding companies that the number of Korean workers decreased greatly compared to foreign workers.

　　Second, during a survey conducted in shipyards, there was no mention of decreased employment opportunities for Korean workers due to competition between foreign and Korean workers at the time when the shipbuilding industry fell into recession.　According to the survey, 58% of all foreign workers working in shipyards were working in jobs that Korean workers avoid.　In addition, 25.4% of all foreign workers in the shipyards were easily controlled by government employment authorities.　In other words, more than 80% of the foreign workers were unlikely to compete with Korean workers in the shipyards that were surveyed.

　　Third, most foreign workers who left the shipbuilding industry also left the region in which the shipyard was located.　They moved to manufacturing industries other than the shipbuilding industry in different regions when seeing at the basic municipality level.

　　Taking these factors into account, the shipbuilding industry fell into recession after 2015, but it is not possible to confirm that Korean workers’ employment opportunities decreased because of competition between foreign and Korean workers.　In addition to the three points that have been mentioned, South Korea’s policy of accepting foreign workers is complementary to both foreign and Korean workers because foreign workers engage in tasks that Koreans avoid.

JEL Classification:J61

　　In recent regional measures, the continuation of small towns and villages has been emphasized. On the other hand, there are large differences in small areas even within the same prefecture due to geographical conditions and historical processes.　For this reason, measures and activities that were effective in other areas are not always appropriate responses.　In order to respond appropriately to the survival of the small area, it is necessary to clarify the economic situation of the area, that is, production, employment and wages, and consumption.　For that purpose, a detailed input-output table of cities, towns, and villages is required.

　　The first purpose of this study is to construct an input-output table of all cities, towns, and villages in Tottori Prefecture, which had not been prepared before.　On the other hand, the life of towns and villages does not stand alone, but consists of a steady production and consumption range centered on cities.　In particular, the relationship between input and output with the city, and the acquisition of income through employment in the city, are important for the continuation of towns and villages.

　　The second purpose of this study is to construct an inter-regional input-output table between cities, towns, and villages within a regular living range centered on cities.　The inter-regional input coefficient table and inverse matrix table clarified the economic and industrial relationship between cities and towns and villages.

　　The final purpose of this study is to confirm the viability of towns and villages from the economic relationship with the central city in certain region.　The analysis was performed by principal component analysis, using the population and economic inducing effects as indices.

　　As a result, it became clear that the most important requirement was productivity.　In addition, industries that rely on local resources are more influential.　However, this is a feature of regions where there is no major industry such as the automobile industry or heavy chemical industry.　The second important requirement is a close relationship with the city, which is a purchase and sale and employment relationship.

JEL Classifications:R11, R12, R15

　　In recent China, with the progress of globalization, there has been a move towards a shift to a sustainable food system in addition to a shift to a modern one.　While sales of food and beverages have remained almost flat, the new trend is that more than half of Chinese consumers are interested in healthy and nutritious foods, and twenty five percent of consumers want to buy upgraded rice （McKinsey, China Consumer Report 2016）.　Since structural changes in food consumption and in the retail market are the driving forces of the dynamism of food system, it is significant to understand the current situation and clarify the issues of food system transition for policy making.

　　The purpose of this study is to capture the dynamic changes in food consumption in China by focusing on the rice retail market.　Specifically, we introduce hedonic approach to analyze the factors of price formation using the information on e-commerce of rice for verifying our two hypotheses.　These are “China’s rice retail market is in a monopolistic competition characterized by product differentiation” （H1） and “The Meaning-based brands related to the formation of sustainable food market are developing in the rice retail market in China” （H2）.　In addition, we conduct the survey at retail stores in Shanghai to reinforce our analytical results.　Based on the above-mentioned analytical results, it is clarified that Chinese food system is in the phase of the transition from a modernization to a food system with both modernization and sustainability.　Finally, we draw policy implication on the strategy for Japanese rice marketing in China as follows.

　　In order to continuously sell a certain lot of Japanese rice in the Chinese market in the future, it is necessary for Japanese rice producers and distributors to work together to develop a marketing strategy based on appropriate market segmentation and targeting under such circumstances.　Specifically, instead of the traditional method of pushing out Japanese rice entirely by the government, firms should actively cooperate with each other to grasp the needs of consumers and build the required brands for Japanese rice through sharing the image and interacting with Chinese consumers.

JEL Classification:D12

　　This paper aims to develop an economic and fiscal macro-econometric model for Mie Prefecture and quantitatively analyze the results to apply to structural analysis, forecasting, simulations and policy evaluations.

　　In particular, I consider the following questions:

　　　　（1）　Will the regional economy grow as the population decreases ?

　　　　（2）　What will happen to supply and demand in the labor market ?

　　　　　 （a）　Will the labor force become insufficient with a declining population ?

　　　　　 （b）　Will the economic decline cause a decrease in labor demand and a lack of employment opportunities ?

　　The purpose of this study was to quantitatively analyze the regional goods market and labor market, and use this information for middle to long-term regional planning.　Therefore, I built a demand-supply-adjustment-type regional macro-econometric model that has the accuracy to withstand long-term forecasts.　In addition, the model has a structure in which the labor market is divided into regular and non-regular sectors （labor, working hours and wages）.

　　The results of the prediction simulation based on the “Mie Prefecture Macro-econometric Model” developed in this study are summarized as follows:“The average growth rate of nominal GRP （regional GDP） was 0.5% （in the years 2016 to 2040）, while the real GRP was 0.3%, and the economy of Mie Prefecture grew slightly in a population declining society.”

　　The economy of Mie Prefecture is characterized by a very high dependence on trade.　After the second world war, petrochemical products, automobiles, liquid crystal panels, and semiconductors continue to take leading roles.

　　In the future, policies of Mie Prefecture should promote high value-added existing industries and attract high value-added industries, thereby accumulating internationally competitive industries in the prefecture.　At the same time, the prefecture should develop specialized and technical human resources to support such industries, and establish a mechanism for people settle down in the prefecture.

JEL Classifications:C30, J31, R15

　　The Sustainable Development Goals （SDGs）, included in the UN’s “Transforming Our World:The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” （the “2030 Agenda”） which was agreed in 2015 by the United Nations, are important factor in considering the sustainability.　SDGs are important in all aspects such as investment, trading, public demand in procurement such as the Olympics and Paralympics, and consumer response.　The SDGs are expected innovation based on the company’s core business power, and companies can utilize them for the CSV （Creating Shared Value） strategy proposed by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer.

　　To that end, it is necessary to develop a system for sustainability management.　ISO 26000 “Guidelines for Social Responsibility” issued in 2010, which comprehensively defines social responsibility, is an important guideline for establishing the system, and has a complementary relationship with CSV.　However, previous studies on the relationship between ISO26000 and CSV are limited.　Therefore, I confirm the corporate social responsibility system shown by ISO26000 and compare it with CSV.　As a result, while ISO26000 comprehensively covers social responsibility and includes many factors that lead to CSV, it can be said that the aspect of corporate competitive strategy as shown by CSV is weak.　Therefore, it is important to use CSV as a competitive strategy while fulfilling corporate social responsibility according to ISO26000.

　　Regarding weaknesses of CSV such as unclearness of social issues pointed out by previous studies on CSV, the use of SDGs, which is the world's common language for sustainability, can be used to complement weaknesses of CSV.

　　From this point of view, regarding SDGs management that utilizes SDGs, first, it is beneficial to carry out sustainability management in accordance with ISO26000 and utilize SDGs, which is a common language for sustainability.　Secondly, it is necessary to clarify the social issues by SDGs and complement the weak points of CSV to create shared value.　And third, it is necessary to make the most of the strong SDGs’ global reach and to have the power to attract sustainable investment and corporate value.

　　“SDGs management” that uses both CSR and CSV together with these three components will be a management strategy for coping with today's rapidly changing society.

JEL Classification:M2