On June 7th, 2025, the Research Institute for Environmental Economics and Management (RIEEM) hosted an international workshop titled “Environmental Economics Workshop: A Comparison of Japan and Taiwan”. Focusing on energy conservation, the event highlighted topics like electricity consumption and encouraging public transport usage.
The event gathered speakers from Osaka University of Economics, University of Tsukuba, and the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan, National Taiwan University, and Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Prof. Akao from Waseda University kicked off the workshop with his opening remarks.
The presentations from Taiwan experts tackled the topic of Energy conservation behaviors, the public transport policy in Taiwan, and climate change impacts. The first presentation was given by Prof. Josie I Chen, who designed a social experiment with her team to analyze the effects of clear conservation targets and task-based incentives. Her research also examined the roles of providing energy-irrelevant tips and voluntary participation in shaping the outcomes. Sharing a similar approach of using social experiments to study energy conservation, Dr. Yating Chuang’s work centered on the influence of social comparisons across domains. Her team analyzed HER-style nudges in Taiwanese university dorms, found that targeted feedback to high users is more promising, and low-cost repeated messaging may offer small salience benefits. The results suggest cautious use of nudges and consideration of room-level dynamics for better targeting. Prof. Ching-i Huang’s research focuses on the public transport system, aiming to quantify the effect of the TPASS policy on transit demand, with a particular focus on bus ridership. Based on RDiT and DID methods, the study finds that the TPASS policy increased bus ridership by 3–4% in Taipei and New Taipei City, resulting CO₂ reduction of 13,347 tons under the best-case scenario under the best-case scenario at the expense of 282 million TWD. Unlike the previous studies, the previous studies, Prof. Jui-Chung Yang’s research focuses on the long-term macroeconomic effects of climate change. They showed that climate change has a long-term negative impact on growth in most countries, especially through temperature deviations in cold, temperate, and rich countries.
Japanese scholars also contributed presentations related to social norms and energy conservation. Prof. Shigeharu Okajima presented a field experiment on moral incentives in a hotel setting, showing that while moral appeals alone had limited impact, linking them to a clear environmental purpose led to a 10.7% reduction in electricity use, nearly half the effect of economic incentives, highlighting the potential of trust-based strategies in non-household contexts. Prof. Mari Sakudo explored the role of social norms in shaping individuals’ energy and resource-saving behaviors in the workplace. Her research combines survey data and structural modeling to address the endogeneity critique in the social norm literature. It finds that descriptive social norms influence various types of pro-environmental behavior in the workplace, with the strength of peer influence varying across different types of actions. As the final presenter, Arina Sato from the Institute of Energy Economics addressed how individual differences in heuristic inference affect the accuracy of people’s perceptions of energy use and savings associated with specific appliances and actions. Their study found that perceptions of energy use and savings differ by individual attributes. Factors such as gender, age, education, and energy-saving awareness significantly influence heuristic inference.
The symposium concluded with a Closing Remark with Prof. Ching-I Huang. He expressed his gratitude to all the presenters and emphasized that the event laid a solid foundation for future collaboration between researchers from Japan and Taiwan. The high quality of the presentations and discussions made the workshop especially fruitful and impactful.
