Objective
Vaccination is a critical measure for containing the COVID-19 pandemic. We survey the determinants that affect the preference for COVID-19 vaccines in Japan, a vaccine hesitant nation.
Setting
and design
: We conducted a randomized conjoint analysis survey of the preference for vaccines on the Internet by recruiting a nonprobability sample of 15,000 Japanese adults. The survey assigned 5 choice tasks to the respondents. In each task, the respondents evaluated 2 hypothetical COVID-19 vaccines and were asked which they would choose. The vaccine attributes included efficacy, major and minor adverse side effects, country of vaccine development and clinical trial, and vaccine type.
Treatment
The choice task asked the participants to select a vaccine from 2 hypothetical vaccines as an optional vaccine or select a vaccine as a mandatory vaccine with a probability of 0.5 for each.
Results
Compared to vaccines developed in China, vaccines developed domestically or in the US raised the choice probability by 131% and 96%, respectively. A domestic clinical trial increased the choice probability by 33%. An increase in efficacy from 50% to 90% increased the choice probability by 43%. A decrease in the risk of severe side effects from 1 per 10 thousand to 1 per 1 million increased the choice probability by 38%. The vaccine type was irrelevant. Making vaccination compulsory increased the choice probability of China- and Russia-developed vaccines by 6% and 4%, respectively, and increased that of taking a high-risk vaccine by 5% and a modestly effective (70%) vaccine by 4%. General vaccination hesitancy, political positions, demographic characteristics, education, and income were irrelevant.
Conclusions
A domestically developed vaccine with a domestic clinical trial could substantially increase the preference for a vaccine. Making vaccination compulsory could modestly reduce the penalty for a vaccine with side effects, geopolitical, and efficacy concerns.
This chapter analyzes the modernization of the silk-reeling industry, focusing on the most prosperous silk reeling district of Suwa. The rapid growth of silk reeling in Suwa is attributed to the establishment of an efficient factory system. Its capacity to supply large amounts of high quality raw silk matched the rising demand from the mechanized silk weaving industry in the United States, resulting in strong competitiveness in the export market.
We study the tenancy contract choice and its impact on productivity in the prewar Japanese agriculture, where a unique contractual form, the rent-reduction contract, was predominant. Theoretically, this contract is more efficient than share tenancy or fixedrent contract in terms of provision of incentives and risk-sharing, and thus raises the question of why such an efficient contract was uncommon outside Japan. We argue that transaction costs on the execution of rent reduction were the key element in the adoption of this contract. In prewar Japan, local communities played some role in governing the process of rent reduction and mitigated such costs. Thus the study proposes transaction costs and institutions as additional determinant of tenancy contract choice. We also find that higher prevalence of tenancy was associated with lower average rice yield at the prefectural level and such correlation was stronger in prefectures with a greater proportion of share tenancy.
An intrinsic feature of a pre-modern society is in its fragmentary markets. Fragmentary markets are more likely to fail in the coordination of resource allocation. However, if a concentrated market is exogenously formed and the market could provide the only price to local markets, the market can work as a pivot of coordination for development. Treaty port markets imposed on nineteenth-century Japan worked as the pivot and ignited Japan's industrialization. We examine the silk-reeling industry, which was the major export industry and which led to Japanese industrialization, and the role of treaty ports in its development.
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