Japan

How can governments support the private sector’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? This book investigates the contribution of firms to the SDGs, particularly through their core business, taking into account inter-sectoral linkages and global value chains, using novel techniques and data sources. Despite the fact that the private sector has the potential to contribute to a wide range of SDGs, and that many firms find it economically viable to develop sustainable products and services, firms still face significant hurdles in their sustainability transition. Based on this new evidence, this book provides some recommendations on the design of industrial policies to enhance the contribution of businesses to the SDGs.

This report assesses the potential for mission-oriented innovation policies (MOIPs) to contribute to the sustainable transition in Japan, and examines the challenges and opportunities that MOIPs would present. As part of a series of MOIP national case studies, the report finds that the ongoing ambitious and top-down MOIPs led by the center-of-government build upon a long history of proactive and goal-oriented policy intervention. MOIPs in Japan are the latest step of decades of efforts to reduce the fragmentation and lack of holistic coordination of Japan’s science, technology and innovation policy in order to proactively address societal challenges. Available evaluations of these policies demonstrate very encouraging results in that regards. The study concludes with recommendations to pursue these efforts, including by mainstreaming these policy initiatives across the government structure and complementing them with more bottom-up challenge-based initiatives.

What does teaching look like? What practices are most impactful? By directly observing teaching in the classroom, this study trialled new research methods to shed light on these key questions for raising student outcomes around the world. This report provides a detailed account of classroom management, social and emotional support, and instructional practices in the classrooms of eight countries and economies, drawing upon the observation of lesson videos and instructional materials, the analysis of teacher and student questionnaires, and the measurement of students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

In Japan, agriculture has been treated differently from other parts of the national economy. However, policy needs to evolve with new agricultural structures and the global trend towards more integrated value chains, enabling innovation and entrepreneurship in agriculture, and imposing a greater environmental responsibility on producers. Modern agriculture is a technology- and data-intensive industry, and Japan is well-positioned to introduce its competitive technology and skills to agriculture through building more collaborative agricultural innovation system.

Japan is embarked on a demographic transition without precedent in human history: the population is both declining and ageing rapidly. This raises important questions about the country's future economic geography, as public policies will need both to respond to these shifts and also to shape them. Demographic change will have particularly important implications for the settlement pattern of the country, and this, in turn, will affect Japan's ability to sustain economic growth and the well-being of its citizens. This Review therefore focuses on the spatial implications of demographic change and the response of spatial policies to it, particularly as these interact with other policies aimed at sustaining the productivity growth that a 'super-ageing' Japan will need in order to maintain its future prosperity. The Japanese authorities have recently put in place a complex package of long-term spatial and structural policies aimed at meeting this challenge. Their experience should be of first-order interest to other OECD countries, as most face the prospect of rapid population ageing and many are also projected to experience significant population decline over the coming decades.