This paper reviews a decade of implementation of the public long-term care insurance (LTCI) program in Japan, which is now experiencing unprecedented pressure from its rapidly aging population. This overview of the program’s features focuses on the incentive mechanisms and diversity, and examines official future projections of LTCI costs and their accompanying assumptions. It also includes the ...

This article explores economic aspects of the market for long-term care (LTC) in Japan. As the world's most rapidly aging nation, it is of interest to understand that country's current LTC system and projections of LTC utilization patterns and costs, as well as their potential drivers. Since Japan appears likely to experience important shortfalls in LTC in the future, the authors also discuss a...

According to John Rawls, there exists a perfect procedural justice for which there is no conflict between process and outcome. One such procedure is the Divide and Choose. Recently, the mathematical theory of fair-division extended this idea by developing procedures that offer fairer outcomes and a better guarantee of justice. Here, we tested the extent to which the distributive and procedural ...

The Internet is known to have had a powerful impact on on-line retailer strategies in markets characterised by long-tail distribution of sales [1]. Such retailers can exploit the long tail of the market, since they are effectively without physical limit on the number of choices on offer. Here we examine two extensions of this phenomenon. First, we introduce turnover into the long-tail distribut...

There has in recent years been some debate, and various analyses, concerning likely future demand for long-term care for elderly people. This has been prompted by the wider policy debate about how best to finance long-term care. The policy debate has culminated in the establishment of the Royal Commission on Long-Term Care for the Elderly. Its report was expected shortly as this Bulletin went t...