as its key philosophy and recommends purchasers to set predetermined prices properly and take effective anti-dumping measures.

While demands for a certain amount of demotion work have loomed into sight as an era of full-scale maintenance and upgrade work sets in, it has become an imminent task to build an appropriate framework of construction in position to respond to a large bulk of problems, including fears of serious accidents involving the public and environmental issues. To preclude accidents during the execution of demotion work and ensure the quality of the work, demolition work has been added as a new sector of the construction industry relevant to its licensing to ensure the quality of the work, so that technicians equipped with relevant technical experience or qualifications will be deployed.

The Construction Industry Revitalization Council (chaired by Senior Vice-Minister Takagi) of the MLIT met in January 2014 to commit itself further to securing and fostering human resources to drive the construction industry in its continuing pursuit of short- and long-term solutions.

## Conclusions

Thus discussed, various efforts are presently underway from the three perspectives of “Use it Wisely,” “Supported by Everyone” and “Taking a Far-Sighted Vision.” Working to ensure that these efforts will demonstrate their effects is necessary. What is also important is to drive further discussions to probe into the futures of the social infrastructures.

Efforts made from the perspective of using social infrastructures wisely can be exemplified by amendments made to the Road Law. As explained in Chapter 2, it is important to proceed with discussions of the scheme and concept of using social infrastructures wisely relevant to national land and transportation. Particularly, ways how to use the schemes of efficiently selecting users of social infrastructures and providers of services using social infrastructures should be explored in various aspects.

Efforts that have been made from the perspective of “Supported by Everyone” include the introduction of a concession scheme at an airport or else, an expanding scope of comprehensive work consignment to private sector and so on. To keep up with further progress, for example, it might be necessary to explore comprehensive work consignment to private sector deals that cover diverse or multiple fields of industry by themselves or promote a way of encouraging greater resident participation, as in Chiba Repo demonstration test.

From a perspective of “Take a Far-Sighted Vision” of social infrastructures, we need not only to support the implementation of efforts conscious of their longevity and life-cycle costs as they are used by local governments but also work to develop an environment that permits securing such human resources capable of maintaining, managing and upgrading them. Meeting these goals should dictate partnership between the central and local governments, and a mechanism to commit the construction industry to a long-term program to secure and foster human resources. In the meantime, it would be necessary for the administrators to keep local residents positively informed of the present status and future prospects of social infrastructures to enable the local residents to select and decide which social infrastructures to eliminate and consolidate and how to maintain, manage and upgrade them, with burdens on their future generations taken into consideration.

We need to always aware of what we can leave for our future generations as we strive to maintain, manage and upgrade social infrastructures.