Masahiro Arima

Recently, local governments have begun to outsource information provision to private web companies, so as to use their own local portal sites to disseminate governmental information alongside private sector information. However, this approach involves some issues that must be addressed. First, there has been no attempt to determine the public's views regarding requirements to be met by public information providers. Second, there has been no attempt to clarify how the public evaluates, in terms of business continuity and information reliability, the credibility of private companies to which such information provision is outsourced. The aim of this research is to examine these issues via resident survey analysis.

Questionnaire surveying has been one of the main means to surface the needs from local residents for local governments or communities and the survey results have been utilized to make concrete policies and measures in almost all local governments in Japan. However, there exists a question whether evaluation questions of satisfactory level and importance assessment on living environments of local community catch the real preference of local residents or not.<br> In this study, based on the questionnaire survey conducted in the town of Shingu, Hyogo prefecture in 2004, we suggest that questions which ask satisfaction and importance level for residents' living environment items by means of ordinal scale such as grading from poor through mediocre and good to excellent tend to overestimate various needs due to external effects of local public facilities and services such as option values, existence values, vicarious values and bequest values and thus we propose the introduction of quantification methods such as CVM(Contingent Valuation Method) to surface the local issues and make the local community management effective.<br> Of course there exist biases in stated WTP(Willingness to Pay), we conclude that the biases derived from evaluation questions using ordinal scale are much greater than biases observed in WTP evaluated by using CVM. As a further extension of this study, we also suggest an introduction of other appropriate evaluation methods such as AHP and conjoint analysis.<br><br>JFL Classification: C24, H43, R22, R59

In the face of population decline, most of local governments are now suffering from tight problem of how to revitalize local communities and local economies. In the process of economic development since the end of World War II, population migration from rural area to urban area and concentration of population to Tokyo metropolitan area have created biased population distribution and emerging ubiquitous network society and potential power of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are expected to be the magic wand for solving problems associated with this distorted society. However we should ask if there are good grounds for believing that ICT can be the savior for regional and/or local revitalization. In this paper, we first define the concept of regional revitalization, consider the measures for regional revitalization from a socio-economic perspective and then finally examine if ICT can contribute to regional revitalization or not.

住民参加のまちづくりを推進する自治体では,PDSのマネジメントサイクルの各段階に住民をいかに参画させていくかが課題となっている.計画と評価の段階への住民参加の方法として,重要度と満足度を順序尺度で評価する住民意識調査が活用されることが多いが,この方法では重要度を過大評価して地域が抱える課題や施策の優先順位設定を誤まるという過ち,換言すれば「間違った問題を正しく解く」という「第3種の過誤」を犯す危険が高くなる.地域のマネジメントにおいていかに「第3種の過誤」を回避するかについて,AHPやコンジョイント分析などの手法とGISの適用可能性も考えながら検証する.

The authors show results of empirical study on residents' involvement in community management activities in an aged huge scale housing complex, based on a questionnaire survey. We found that personal attributes, such as age, housing ownership and house type affect residents'. attitude toward involvement in community management activities. By applying conjoint analysis technique, we revealed that residents prefer payment of some amount of money to a community management organization to their involvement in activities of the community management organization. This empirical result indicates difficulties of residents' involvement in the activities of community management organizations.

The e-Japan Strategy formulated in 2000 considers the establishment of an e-government or e-local governments to be one of its major projects. Among the themes related to the establishment of e-local governments, the implementation of a new-type local portal sites has begun to attract all related parties; local governments, private sectors and third sectors as site operators, and local residents as site users. On the local portal site, administrative information released by local government is provided together with business information from local private sectors. Local governments are able to cut the operational cost of their official web site by outsourcing its operation, and outsourced operators are able to attract more viewers by enriched site contents and thus earn more advertisement revenue. Moreover, users will have easier accesses to their target information, as all relevant information is found on the same portal. Therefore, this seemingly making-every-stakeholders-happy policy will become popular among local governments in the near future; in fact, some advanced local governments have already started to implement such a local portal site. However, there are several issues to be considered: apart from expectations of local governments and web operators, it is not yet clear which organization is supported as operator of their portal site, or how they would evaluate the method that provides administrative information and business information on the same web site. Furthermore, the economic advantages of this method have not yet been determined. The purpose of this research is to examine two of the issues mentioned above: residents' preference for site operators and contents provided by applying conjoint analysis. The research was conducted using a questionnaire which was administered to the residents of Itami City, Hyogo. The survey results indicated that the residents placed the highest value on the combined provision of customized administrative information and business information. The most cost-effective way at the moment is to re-design the traditional official web sites of local governments, aiming to enhance the residents' convenience by customizing the information by users' demographic attributes. Results also indicated that the residents preferred their local government to operate the site. We believe that these study results provide basic but valuable suggestions for the gradual establishment of true e-local governments.

How to make policy assessment is one of the biggest issues for local governments. Questionnaire surveying has been one of the main means to surface the needs from local residents for the local government or community and the survey results have been utilized to draw out concrete policies or measures in almost all local governments in Japan. However, an empirical research made by our research group has suggested that questions which ask satisfaction and importance level for residents' living environment items by means of ordinal scale tend to overestimate their needs due to external effects from local public facilities and services such as option value and prestige value and thus we proposed the introduction of quantification methods such as CVM(Contingent Valuation Method), AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and Conjoint Analysis to surface local issues and make local community management effective.<br> In this study, we considered the policies in local governments to be a package of concrete measures for attaining goals in various policy fields and verified the applicability of conjoint analysis to policy assessment. Based on a questionnaire survey we conducted in Tatsuno, Hyogo Prefecture in 2006, we maintain that conjoint analysis is a viable method to grasp the preferences of residents for policies made by local governments. The results of conjoint analysis are presented and some tips for carrying out conjoint analysis through the questionnaire survey which we conducted.<br> As a further extension of this study, we plan to propose a viability of GIS based feedback system of questionnaire results to local residents. The goal of our research study is to verify the concept of “Informed Decision by Informed Citizens through GIS” and support local residents to participate all the steps of local community management process: Plan, Do and See or Check and Action.<br>JEL Classification: C35, R22, R58

Questionnaire surveying has been one of the main means for surfacing the needs of local residents by the local government or community and these survey results have been utilized to make policies in almost all local governments in Japan. In this study, based on a questionnaire survey conducted in Shingu Town, Hyogo prefecture in 2004, we found questions that ask satisfaction and importance level of 55 living environment items by means of ordinal scale tend to overestimate residents' needs. This is because of external effects from local public facilities and services such as option values and prestige values. Therefore we propose the introduction of quantification methods such as CVM (Contingent Valuation Method), AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and Conjoint Analysis to determine the local issues and create a local community that is effectively managed.<br> Particularly, we examined the applicability of an extended version of AHP named “Relative Position Measurement Approach” which has been proposed by A. Mori, S. Suzuki, K. Suzuki and H. Igarashi. To do this, firstly, we designed a question asking local residents for marking relative importance of 6 different living environment fields such as social infrastructure, health and welfare, education and culture, and public participation on a 0 to 10 cardinal scale. Then answers from 680 respondents out of 4,860 households in Shingu Town were processed through AHP weighting process to calculate importance weights for 6 living environment fields. Finally, statistical analysis such as multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis were applied to compare the relationship between estimated importance weights over 6 living environment fields calculated by applying AHP and importance levels evaluated over 55 living environment items which are grouped into 6 upper rank living environment fields. The results strongly supported our hypothesis that each importance evaluation on ordinal scale overestimates the real needs for local public facilities and services. Furthermore, a question that value of calculated weights might be affected by the structure of evaluation items or attributes hierarchy is raised.<br> As a further extension of this study, we discuss the viability of a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) based feedback system to provide questionnaire results to local residents.<br><br>JEL Classification: C35, R22, R58

The purpose of this study is twofold. The first is to review the necessity of arts related policy assessment and arts marketing under the movements of municipal mergers and circumstance of tightening budget in local governments in Japan. The second is to examine the possibilities and challenges for implementation of arts related policy assessment and arts marketing in local government. In order to do this, we use the data from questionnaire surveys conducted for the audience of "Arts Theaters for Hyogo Prefecture Residents" from year 2000 to 2003 and propose the applicability of Geographic Information Systems to arts related policy assessment and arts marketing.

The purpose of this study is to grasp the demand structure for arts and culture related activities in terms of household spending. By using microdata from the national survey of family income and expenditure conducted by the Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in 1999, we estimated the relationships between spending structures and factors affecting them such as annual income, savings, life-stage, household types and region and city ranks where they live.