About Policy Assessment Program

Program Director

KAWAGUCHI Daiji's photo

KAWAGUCHI Daiji(Program Director and Faculty Fellow)

The Policy Assessment program will accelerate EBPM by simultaneously researching the ideal form of EBPM and evaluating individual policies. Prompted by the release of the "Final Summary of the Committee to Promote Reforms in Statistics" (May 19, 2017), which advocated for the promotion of EBPM, central government agencies and local governments have gradually started to practice EBPM. During this process, joint studies with research institutions and universities started to emerge. Almost three years have passed since the launching of this effort and funds have been allocated to EBPM-related projects. EBPM is gradually shifting from the trial stage to the formal adoption stage.

Against this backdrop, RIETI's Fifth Medium-Term Plan assesses the current situation by stating that "EBPM (Evidence-Based Policy Making) will play an even greater role in the future in solving economic/social issues that are becoming more diverse and complex" and describes how RIETI will address EBPM by stating that "in light of the importance of EBPM in recent years, we will address a broad range of EBPM-related needs by expanding our resources, working with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry as early as the formative stage of policies for effective EBPM, and utilizing our network of external researchers."

To contribute to achieving this objective in the Fifth Medium-Term Plan, efforts in the Policy Assessment program will be performed via two major types of projects.

The first type of project includes those projects that analyze EBPM from a meta perspective. EBPM is not monolithic. On a fundamental level, there are different views on what constitutes "evidence" in this context. While some claim that evidence is the quantitative representation of the situation surrounding a particular policy, others claim that evidence can only be shown by identifying the precise causal relationship between policy interventions and outcomes. Broad adoption of EBPM is unlikely to occur unless we organize this debate and identify the protocols that policymakers should follow when preparing the evidence on which policy making is based, to ensure a certain level of credibility. In addition, if we want to make good use of such evidence in policy making, we also need to examine the best designs for the administrative process. Furthermore, we need to examine the extent to which such evidence is utilized in actual policy making. Therefore, our goal is to offer some answers to these issues during the Fifth Medium-Term Plan period.

The second type of project includes those projects that address individual policy areas and accumulate evidence that contributes to the policy formulation in respective areas. In this group of projects, we will begin by accurately determining the phenomena where policy actions are necessary by adopting high-quality data and appropriate metrics. Then, we will use empirical microeconomic techniques to identify the causal relationships between variables and examine the mechanisms that govern these causal relationships from various angles. Through these steps, the program will develop high-quality evidence to contribute to policy making. Furthermore, we will examine those cases in which specific policies have been implemented by performing policy evaluations regarding whether these policies have achieved the expected goals and whether they had unintended consequences. The specific policy areas the program will address include education, labor, tax, and social security.