tokyo

Japan's largest-ever economic stimulus package, unveiled two weeks ago and intended to halt the deterioration in the country's economy, has met with mixed reactions from the scientific community.

Part of the extra money to be spent on public works — which includes projects linked to environmental protection, energy, information and telecommunications — will go on improving research facilities at nationally run universities and institutes.

One beneficiary will be the University of Tokyo, which ran into difficulties last year when it failed to obtain government funding to acquire the land for its new campus in Kashiwa, Chiba prefecture (see Nature 392, 429; 1998). The stimulus package will now allow the university to transfer its Institute of Solid State Physics to the new campus.

Several projects will receive additional funding from the stimulus package as part of its commitment to promoting ‘commercially applicable research’. For example, the Biomolecular Frontier Programme and the Brain Research Institute will receive a further ¥3.4 billion (US$26 million) and ¥5.3 billion respectively towards the completion of new research buildings, and ¥18.7 billion will go to work on the Japanese module of the International Space Station.

But many scientists remain worried that the hastily compiled package risks wasting money by investing heavily in expensive equipment and buildings without ensuring their efficient use.

A director of one research institute run by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture says: “It seems that the construction, transportation and telecommunications ministries, as well as related industries, managed to win the money-grabbing game. There has been very little planning behind this.”

His major concern is that, if the new stimulus package were to be followed by a sharp recession in a couple of years' time, universities and research institutes could be left with pristine facilities and state-of-the-art equipment, but no money to run them.

Almost half of the ¥16.65 trillion package will be spent on public works projects proposed by national and local governments. Most of the public works funds will be spent on traditional projects such as reclamation and building highways, roads and bridges, but ¥1.5 trillion will be invested in ‘new types’ of projects such as developing a fibre-optic communications network.

The heavy emphasis in the stimulus package on traditional public works is intended, it seems, to allow these areas to acquire what they failed to gain in the main 1998 budget that came into effect on 1 April.

This budget had originally been drawn up under new fiscal legislation, introduced last November, to cap major spending and reduce the national deficit. But the government has since amended the law to allow it to launch the economy-boosting package.