The Japanese Ministry of Environment is promoting green purchasing policies across all levels of Japanese government. A primary reason is that green purchasing policies have the potential to significantly reduce carbon impacts across the globe and can help Japan achieve its carbon emissions...

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This paper uses Japanese prefecture-level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of...