JFY2018 Awardees
Up to Yen 5 million ($45,000)/year for up to 3 years
ProjectResearch on
constructing open
data for policies
to reduce childpoverty

PIAya ABE
Professor
School ofHumanities andSocial Sciences,
Tokyo Metropolitan
UniversitySynopsis
This project will try to contribute to the evidence-based policy making at local governments, by using the survey-based data they
possess and focusing on the child abuse issue. It will be carried through three stages: The first stage is to integrate various databaseson child abuse into a single standard database; the second is to analyze the integrated database by interdisciplinary analysis team,extract evidences that could be used for policies, and propose policies based on discussions with the local governments’policymakers; the third is to return the policy recommendations to the local governments as well as to train the local governments’members as to how to establish open data based on surveys conducted by them. Child abuse issue will be used as an example tocome up with policies based on survey data.

Healthcare
innovation byreducing hospitalbeds and urbanplanning

Yukiko ITOProfessor, College ofPolicy Studies,
Tsuda University

The number of hospital beds in Japan is 2.8 times more and the hospital stays are 2.1 times longer, compared with the other OECDnations. These excess is not effective in maintaining productivity at middle-sized cities (population size of 100,000-300,000) that havethe capacity of providing the secondary-level acute medical cares. In view of the declining population, it is essential to reduce hospitalbeds effectively.
The central government that is aware of the fiscal deficits due to the excessive medical facilities has proposed several plans to makehospitals function more focused and compact. However, the local governments and hospitals are reluctant to lose local industrial
businesses and customers. Thus, they have little incentives to solve the issues derived from excessive beds. The goal of this project isto solve this.
We will propose a model for “Policy for Reducing Hospital Beds and Urban City” that will verify hospital beds deduction will improvethe vitalization of local areas and hospital management. To be prepared for that, it is important both to “reduce the hospital size andbring efficient productivity” and to “explore investment opportunities for different industries” in tandem.
We will also integrate and develop our knowledge on and the experiments in specific cities into a more generalized form. As anexample, we plan to create a list of data to be collected and analyzed, and another list of legal procedures and contracts to befollowed. Such knowhow would help cities to efficiently conduct policies.

Construction of acommons using
ICT to generate
evidence forKazuto KATO
Professor, Graduate
School of Medicine,Osaka University

The need for a policymaking method that incorporates patients’ views has been recognized worldwide. However, patients’participation is not enough in Japan. The patients have often been appealing their opinions and some patients do not have patients’groups, which caused their petitions not be reflected on the policies. In addition, the government-led R&D programs have been
designed mainly by the policymakers and researchers.

medical policy
This project is to answer the questions on how to establish evidences that reflect the views of patients and medical researchers andhow to establish policies based on the evidences. It will have the medical research on rare and intractable disease as the source of“evidence-generating commons.” Through existing networks, patients and researchers will carry out discussions on the needs andchallenges necessary to design medical research policies. Many of the discussion meeting will be conducted by use of ICT so thatparticipants can join even if they are in distant areas. The second stage will have the policy makers join the “commons” and thediscussion results will be analyzed from the view point of the actual government policy’s applicability.
This project will bring new opportunities for various stakeholders to actively participate in policy making processes, and also provide
policy makers who work on designing funding strategies of medical research in the government sectors with valuable and usefulevidence.
Biology-informed,
family-friendly
policies against
declining birthrate in Japan

Kumi KURODA
Principal
Investigator,
Laboratory for
Affiliative
Social Behavior,
RIKEN Center for
Brain
Science

Birth rate in Japan has been declining since 1973, while a number of policies have been taken to solve the problem. Such policy
inefficiency could have been caused by the fact that the policy-making boards have not been well-informed with biological andbehavioral sciences on human beings, so that the resultant policies were not necessarily biologically feasible. Similarly,
countermeasures on declining birth rate have logical conflicts with the current labor policy that facilitates women's labor force inmarket, as well as the elderly people care policy that tries to switch institutional care to family care. Such policy conflicts inevitably
increase at-home workload and may cause damages on well-being of family members, especially children.
This project tries to establish family-friendly, biology-informed policy making against declining birth rate in Japan, with the following
objectives: (A) to investigate child maltreatment perpetrators (case history, cognitive and neurological studies) in order to come up
with efficient interventions; (B) to implement parental- and family-support programs supplied by private organizations in order tofacilitate public welfare sourcing; and (C) to make biological and behavioral science-informed evaluation of family policies in order forpolicy against declining birth rate in Japan to be more family-friendly and therefore be more effective long term.