Interview with Prof. Watanabe in the Nikkei

An interview with Professor Tsutomu Watanabe, who is one of the coinvestigators in our project, has been published in the renowned newspaper Nikkei Daily.
Asked about the causes of the recent scandal in which numerous defects in the data on labor provided by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare were unearthed, Prof. Watanabe expressed the opinion that government organs in charge of gathering and processing data are late in conducting digitalization, a problem which is behind many statistical mistakes, and lag behind private actors both in terms of acquired data and data processing skills.
Prof. Watanabe therefore proposes that the government speed up the process of digitalization in order to cut the labor needed for various surveys and eliminate simple mistakes, and follow examples from abroad in creating a system in which its organs could benefit from transfers of digital information owned by private companies.
The interview was published in Japanese in the morning edition of Nikkei on Wednesday, the 30th of January (Title: "Saving Labor by Having Private Companies Involved", p.5).