NTC@Maryland Sponsored Seminar Series: Prof. Tatsuo Oyama

On August 6, 2014, 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM, Prof. Tatsuo Oyama from National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan, gave a research presentation in the CEE Main Conference Room, 1179 Glenn Martin Hall, University of Maryland, College Park. The topic is “Investigating the damaging impacts of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and evaluating the restoration and reconstruction performance”.

Abstract: Three years have passed since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) hit the northeastern part of Japan. The earthquake then triggered tsunami and nuclear accident, which in turn created a compound disaster that claimed large number of human casualties and devastated properties. The GEJE has caused the economy growth to decline by 2.2% with the largest decrease experienced by the industrial sector (-7.1%), followed by agricultural sector (-3.6%) and services sector (-0.2%). Agriculture and manufacturing sectors underwent large decrease in growth since most of the affected prefectures have relied on their economy on these two sectors. Thus, by investigating the damaging impacts of the 2011 GEJE we try to evaluate the restoration and reconstruction performance in the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Our study finds that there have been significant progresses made towards restoration and reconstruction on the areas affected by the disaster. Using the prefectural data from 2001 to 2012, we apply econometric method based upon the bias-corrected least-squares dummy variable to estimate the impact of the 2011 GEJE on agricultural and manufacturing sectors, in which two major insights emerge. First, the GEJE brought a significant negative impact on agriculture and manufacturing sectors. On average, the impact on agriculture sector is higher than on the manufacturing sector, namely about 2 times higher. Second, in each sector, the impact of the disaster is perceived differently depending on the region. In both agriculture and manufacturing sectors, the most affected prefectures experienced about 3 times higher impact than the less affected prefectures.

Prof. Tatsuo Oyama obtained Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from College of Engineering of the University of Tokyo in Japan in 1969 and 1971, respectively. He was given degree of Ph.D from School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) in the College of Engineering of Cornell University in 1977. He worked for the Economic Research Institute of the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Japan as a researcher from 1971 to 1980. Then he taught at the Department of Arts and Science, and Graduate School of Policy Science in Saitama University as Assistant Professor in 1980-81, Associate Professor in 1981-1988 and Professor in 1988-1997. He has been teaching as a Professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) since 1997. He has been Dean from April, 2000 to March, 2014 and Vice President from June, 2003 to March, 2014 at GRIPS. He has been Board of Trustee Member and Senior Professor since March, 2014 at GRIPS. Also he has been working active as a Vice President for the Operations Research Society of Japan.

His major research interests are in applying operations research theory to public sectors decision making, policy analysis and evaluation. He has published many papers in the areas such as optimization theory, mathematical programming model and their applied areas. His papers appeared in Journal of Combinatorial Theory (A), IEEE Transactions on Power Apparatus and Systems, Communications of Operations Research, Journal of Operations Research of Japan, Journal of Civil Engineering Society in Japan, OPSEARCH, International Transactions in Operational Research, Japan Journal of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and so on. He published 9 books in Japanese entitled such as “Graph, Network and Matroid”, “Algorithm”, “Optimization Model Analyses”, “Discrete Mathematics”, “Public Policy and OR”, “Policy Evaluation : Theory and Practice”, and so on.

Published August 7, 2014