About Integrated Research Program

For the Fifth Medium-Term Plan period that started in FY 2020, RIETI has a plan to employ the following framework to promote comprehensive research:

Japan is facing a variety of challenges, including the acceleration of the population decline associated with a rapidly falling birthrate and an aging population and energy/environmental issues. We need to realize "Society 5.0" through the advancement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, incorporating AI, IoT, and Big Data, to solve these issues. The national government, including the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, advocates the promotion of Society 5.0 to solve various issues. To realize Society 5.0 in the future, we need both the public implementation of new general-purpose technologies and we need to facilitate the transformation of organizations and people to reconstruct the entire socioeconomic system. Therefore, the integration of social scientific elements and industrial technologies (the integration of humanities and sciences) is essential. RIETI will work with other research institutions to expand the network and promote multidimensional research. In addition, Evidence-Based Policy Making will play an even greater role in the future for solving economic/social issues that are becoming more diverse and complex.

To "facilitate the transformation of organizations and people to reconstruct the entire socioeconomic system" via the "integration of social scientific elements and industrial technologies (the so-called integration of humanities and sciences)" promoted in this plan, it is necessary to solve the problems associated with the "barriers" afflicting Japan's current economy. RIETI has been addressing various problems concerning barriers in the economy, such as the barriers between permanent and non-permanent employees and between men and women in the workplace. This reflects the view that the barriers persisting in society are hindering the development of the economy.

Academia has also suffered from the problem of barriers. Various barriers—between humanities and sciences, between law and economics, between microeconomics and macroeconomics, and between theory and empirical verification—exist in universities and research organizations. It is essential to remove these to allow for innovation and enable organizations to become more sophisticated. The Basic Act on Science and Technology, whose goal was the promotion of science and technology, but not the humanities, was amended at the beginning of 2020 and rewritten as the Basic Act on Science, Technology, and Innovation. Therefore, there is now a greater awareness of the detrimental effect of barriers in Japanese society, which RIETI has championed.

Considering these trends, the Integrated Research program will expand efforts to incorporate new knowledge in other disciplines such as the natural sciences, law, political science, and sociology into economics and policy studies. The program will facilitate the creation of original datasets and promote original research based on these data so that the rapidly-developing knowledge from the natural science disciplines, such as life science and information science, can be incorporated into economics. We will incorporate elements such as health and biomarkers and examine social capital and other dynamics to identify factors that shape the construction of society. The program will also examine the relationship between consumption and society via new data and analytical techniques by linking the original Big Data concerning political uncertainty, that RIETI has been building, to the Big Data concerning consumption. The program will also investigate questions related to law and economics, such as corporate governance and the nature of a legal system to realize a healthier market and problems such as ethnic conflicts and gender gaps from a political-scientific perspective. Furthermore, the program will seek answers to urgent problems for future society using interdisciplinary integration as the foundation.