and Acheson (1972) pointed out, prestige is one of the important incentives for
bureaucrats’ behaviors. According to Breton and Wintrobe (1982), many other studies
concerned with incentives of bureaucrats’ behaviors mentioned that career promotion is
also an important incentive.
Prestige and promotion may explain why bureaucrats in charge of rice set-aside
programs accept political pressures relatively easily even though they are not political
appointees. To insist on promoting a future Japanese agricultural vision may contribute
to their career and prestige, of course. However, it would bring more serious damage to
their prestige and an individual’s career if such insistence incurred strong resistance to
uneven discretionary allocation from some prefectures and eventually resulted in a fatal
deadlock or the like.
On one side, to continue to chant slogans which support publicly disclosed factors
used in the allocation calculating formula, and on the other side, to reconcile with
political pressure, is a wise strategy for bureaucrats to maintain their prestige and the
possibility of individuals’ career promotions. Since how to weight these factors in the
calculation formula is not transparent, bureaucrats can take advantage of this lack of
transparency to achieve both program and political objectives: chanting slogans in order
to promote future visions, and reconciling with political pressure by lessening the
weights of strongly opposed factors in the calculation.
Additionally, it should be noted that, in a sense, such behaviors should not be
one-sidedly criticized as a political distortion. As mentioned above, indeed, such
revision may often cause undesirable and inefficient resource allocation. However,
bureaucrats inherently have a limited volume of information related to farmers’
subjective utility loss. To take note of farmers’ grievances is, from a political viewpoint,
an improvement in bureaucrats’ attitude, compared with that in some decades ago. As
textbooks of public economics often mention, government, if it attempts to replace the
market, intrinsically has insufficient information. This feature causes so called
political appointees.
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