Pension Provision for Specific Risk Groups: The Japanese Case

The growing variety of possibilities in one life course raises coverage, fairness and social adequacy questions about existing public pension provision. This paper examines problems of drop-out, full-time housewives, carers, divorced or remarried people and those engaged in atypical work in Japan. A possible solution will be a universal basic pension financed by a consumption-based tax. It is also advisable to expand social security coverage of the earnings-related pension to any earners irrespective of their earnings amount, if any. In implementing this provision, an integrated single social security pension number for each person is required, and this has already been introduced in Japan. The 1999 government reform plan for pensions is also mentioned.     

Selection of variables and neighborhoods for spatial enhancement of thermal infrared images

The Landsat TM sensor tor rhrrmal infrared measurement has lower spatial resoltion than that of other six measurements. Nishii et al (1996) proposed a procedure to corrct the measurement by a linear combination of remaining high-resolution measurements. To find an efficient combinationof measurements, the averaged information) criteria based on AIC are purposed. Then the efficiency of the procedure is assessed through SSE by using actual TM data.     

The 1994 Reform Bill for public pensions in Japan: Its main contents and related discussion

In March 1994 the Japanese government submitted a bill to the National Diet to reform the public pension system. It proposes to increase the normal retirement age for the flat-rate basic benefits for employees from 60 to 65 years of age by stages (between 2001 and 2013 for men), while guaranteeing to pay the earnings-related benefits for them from age 60 without any reduction. It also proposes a much more generous earnings-test and an introduction of old-age employment benefits, both to encourage later retirement. Another main proposal is to switch the benefits indexation from a gross to a net wage basis. This paper gives a detailed explanation of the bill, discussing why such a reform bill is submitted, whether or not it can manage to control the cost of social security in the long term, and whether or not the reform measures can effectively generate jobs for the elderly. Pensions for women, as well as some measures to support both childbirth and childrearing, are also explored.     

Contrasting effects of urbanization on arboreal and ground-dwelling land snails: role of trophic interactions and habitat fragmentation

Urbanization generally reduces wildlife populations. Individual species responses, however, are often highly variable, and such variability can be explained by differences in species ecological traits. To examine this hypothesis, we focused on two co-occurring land snails, Ezohelix gainesi and Euhadra brandtii sapporo; the former is ground-dwelling and the latter is arboreal. We first estimated their population densities at nine sites distributed along an urbanization gradient: three were located in continuous natural forests, three at the edge of natural forests, and the rest in small isolated forests in urban areas. As a result, the ground-dwelling E. gainesi occurred at highest density in urban forests, followed by forest edges and continuous forests. By contrast, the arboreal E. b. sapporo occurred at highest density in continuous forests, but declined in forest edges and urban forests. We then conducted manipulative field experiments to quantify changes in predation pressure on these species. Ground-tethered E. gainesi and E. b. sapporo were repeatedly predated upon by forest-living mammals in continuous forests, but their survival rates increased in forest edges and urban forests. By contrast, canopy-tethered E. b. sapporo maintained high survival rates in all three forest types. The results indicate that a lack of mammalian predators enables ground-dwelling species to occur at high densities in urban forests, whereas the arboreal species was not affected by this predator relaxation effect. The combination of species-specific behavioural traits and changes in predator communities across an urbanization gradient has important effects on the biodiversity of urban ecosystems.

     

Correction to: contrasting effects of urbanization on arboreal and ground-dwelling land snails: role of trophic interactions and habitat fragmentation

Urban Ecosystems - The original version of the article unfortunately contained mistakes in the legends of Fig. 3. The legends (1) Blue square: Euhadra brandtii sapporo, ground is changed...     

Japan's never–ending social security reforms

This paper examines implications of the 2002 population projections for future trends in pension and healthcare costs in Japan. Current redistributive pension and healthcare programmes have resulted in considerably higher per capita income for the aged than the non–aged population. Substantive reforms are needed to lessen the extent of such redistribution, but political considerations have meant that only incremental reforms have been feasible. A start, however, has been made on introducing private initiatives in pensions; and shifting from the command and control model operated by the central government to a contracting model for healthcare.