Greeting from the
New Executive Director
of GISPRI

Akinobu Yasumoto
Executive Director, GISPRI

     As a newly appointed Executive Director for the Global Industrial and Social Progress Research Institute, I sincerely hope to contribute for the development of GISPRI's works with renewed determination and motivation.  I would appreciate if you could continue to extend your support and advice on our activities as you did for my predecessor, late Mr. Katsuo Seiki.

     For the past two centuries and more since the industrial revolution, we have experienced a remarkable development in our society and economy. Scientific advancement and technological development are the primary factors that may have contributed to these trends, but equally important is the institutional development of democracy and market economy as well as the global diffusion of such institutions.  One of the most noteworthy characteristics of market economy is how it can allow the direct interaction between the daily decision-making of individuals and the social decision making of a community as a whole.  Individual decision-making made for the need to satisfy individual wants sends a constant signal to the community for its social decision-making, and the community feeds back the signal through social decision-making for a benefit of each individual.

     The democracy may not allow as much directness as market economy for the interaction between individual decision making and social decision making.  Its distribution of power may not be as extensive as that of market economy, either.  Nonetheless, in the history of democracy, a democratic decision-making system has performed fairly well and allowed the intent of each individual to be reflected upon the social decision-making.  We can note its performance especially in the area where market economy may have difficulty in making social decisions, such as the case of public goods.

     Both institutions of democracy and market economy have succeeded in overcoming the potential conflicts of interests between individuals and a society as a whole, by persistently inventing institutional approaches that can directly connect individual decision-making with social decision-making.  Furthermore, both institutions have successfully synchronized and united the efforts of individuals to increase social benefits and the social efforts to increase the benefit of each individual.  The synchronization of mutual efforts has resulted in the social progress and prosperity of countries which have adopted these two institutions.

     Unfortunately, to attain the optimum function of these two excellent institutions, democracy and market economy, will require a society to fulfill certain conditions.  The most important conditions of all will be the trust among individuals upon the observance of institutions, and the transparency in the institutions for the access to correct information and knowledge.  Any diversion from trust and transparency may result in economic stagnancy we find today in some developing countries and economies in transition.

     Although the developmental dictatorship may be able to restore people's trust in institutions by forcing people to obey dictatorship, and thereby vitalize national economic activities, the lack of informational transparency will eventually lead to moral hazards within the administration.  Therefore, the dictatorship will never endure success in development.

     These factors of trust and transparency are truly the prerequisite for democracy and market economy, yet they themselves have been nurtured through the process of institutional development for democracy and market economy.  How to solve this problem of "chicken and egg" relationship is a key global issue in ensuring the peace and prosperity of a human society.

     Another key global issue is the bounded rationality.  However excellent the institutions of democracy and market economy are as the method of social decision-making, they cannot make up for the bounded rationality of mankind.  No one can ever precisely predict the consequence of our own decision-making beyond our own time and generation.  If we could do so, there would be many problems we could avoid in future.  A good example of such problems is a global environmental issue.  Others may include the occurrence of bubble burst and other various political and economic catastrophes.  Because of the bounded rationality, no knowledge and information can ever be perfect, which means that we clearly do have rooms to improve.  By persistently pursuing the scientific assessment and the study of precise knowledge and information, and by continuously making the result of such studies available for use in our society, we will be able to make an extremely valuable contribution for the peace and harmony of a human society in future.  GISPRI's mission and its accomplishment is called for more than before, with increasing significance, as we gather the wisdom of many global experts, search for the resolutions of global issues, and disseminate the result of research and survey works.  In this sense, also, I feel a great loss of a valuable individual in my predecessor's passing.

May I ask again for your continued cooperation and support for GISPRI and me.