April 2016 to March 2017

Authors/Persons in charge:
Takehiko Kato (Chief Fellow, Institute for International Socio-Economic Studies)

 It is forecasted that the population of Japan will be further decreased down to the level of 86,740 thousands and the population ageing rate (the ratio of the aged population over 65 ) will reach 40% in the year 2050.

 While the people are concentrating and flowing more in the urban areas, the birth rate will be declining there in the urban area, accelerating the worrying trend of the declining birth rate and the growing proportion of elderly people at the same time.

 This trend is not specific to Japan, but, to other countries sooner or later as well, so this is definitely global social issue, and it is globally required to vitalize local or regional community and society by curbing down the concentration of the people to urban areas and by maintaining the diversity and sustainability of the unique local or regional community and society.

 Japanese Government established headquarter for “Vitalizing town, people, and job in the local area” under the Cabinet Office and with the support of this headquarters there are a number of cases that local governments made up their own local plan and strategy to vitalize their community and economy, and actually implemented such plans.

 In the local area of Japan the digitalization and its infrastructure has been organized and developed reasonably so that they are prepared to utilize ICT to increase the productivity and to promote the employment in the local economy.

 In this report the study is made how to best utilize latest ICT technology like AI and big data analysis to assist vitalization of local economy in the age of advanced information society.

 In the intermediate report the outline was presented how the revitalization of local economy is progressed with the supplemental coverages of actual examples of ICT utilization, the organizations engaged in the vitalization of local economy and society, the relevant  local financial arrangement, the trend of IoT platform development.

 In the final report we summarize the case study of projects in Japan and in overseas countries to challenge the vitalization of local economy and community. We then analyze how the network is organized and ICT is utilized in the “National Land Grand Design 2050” published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, and further studied the financial administration policies and their influence to the local banks or financial institutes, and finally based on these findings and analysis the summary and proposal are made.