Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Japan Coast Guard (JCG) is a government agency of Japan that is in charge of the maritime safety in the Japanese territorial sea. Since its foundation in 1948, the JCG has been trying to reduce the number of maritime accidents. In order to accomplish the further maritime safety around Japan, the JCG has set a long-term objective for 2030 in its five-year plan for the period of 2013-2018: to halve the number of maritime accidents in the Japanese territorial sea from the average annual number of maritime accidents in the period of 2008-2012.

            Despite of the hard effort of the JCG for maritime safety to reach this ambitious goal, there are some concerns about the feasibility of the objective. One of the main concerns is the declining budget of the JCG for maritime safety. If the reduction of the JCG’s budget for maritime safety continues, it may be difficult for the JCG even to maintain the function of its facilities for maritime safety. In fact, the number of those facilities, which are named Aids to Navigations (ATONs), has been decreasing in Japan since early 2000s due to the budgetary difficulty of the JGC.

            There has not been any academic work that quantitatively analyzes the relationship between the budgetary problem of the JCG and its effect on the maritime safety in Japan, although the maritime safety is crucial for the island country whose economy heavily relies on marine activities. If there is a statistical causal relationship between the number of maritime accidents and the amount of JCG’s budget for maritime safety, it would give the Japanese government a good opportunity to reconsider the budget allocation for ensuring the maritime safety in Japan.

            This research investigates the statistical characteristics of the annual number of maritime accidents based the time series data in the period of 1978-2015, in order to evaluate the feasibility of the JCG’s long-term objective in the situation of the decreasing budget. The result of the time series analyses based on a Finite Distributed Lag model indicate that the annual number of maritime accidents in Japanese territorial sea decreases year by year regardless of the amount of JCG’s budget or the number of the JCG’s ATONs. Another key finding from the analyses is that, among the maritime accidents caused by various type of ships, there is a significant increasing time trend of the number maritime accidents caused by pleasure boats; this result supports the JCG’s policy focus to accomplish the long term objective.

Additionally, this research also conducts an analysis that focuses on the maritime accidents around Japan caused by pleasure boats. The result of the time series analysis based on a Feasible Generalized Least Square model shows that some policies of the government have had significant effects on the number of pleasure boat accidents. Especially, the provision of maritime safety information on the JCG’s website has decreased the number of pleasure boat accidents, which shows the possible contributions of emerging information technologies to accomplish the JCG’s long-term objective.