Akira Kawamura

Akira Kawamura is a Professor at Waseda University's School of Human Sciences, Faculty of Human Sciences, with concurrent appointments in the Graduate School of Political Science and Graduate School of Human Sciences. His academic work focuses on public economics and labor economics with specialized expertise in health economics and social security policy. Kawamura maintains active roles across multiple academic units including the School of Human Sciences (Online Degree Program) and the Global Education Center.

His research interests center on the economic analysis of healthcare systems, long-term care insurance, and social security policy in Japan. Kawamura extensively utilizes administrative data from Japanese government sources, particularly the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions and National Health and Nutrition Survey. His work frequently examines the intersection of health status, labor force participation, and social welfare policies, with significant attention to aging populations in Japan's super-aged society. He has conducted influential research on child welfare economics, using panel data from Adachi Ward to analyze remedial education programs and the relationship between financial support and academic performance.

Kawamura's publication record demonstrates consistent scholarly output with 14 papers indexed in Scopus showing 191 citations and an h-index of 7. His recent work (2022-2025) shows increasing focus on pandemic impacts on elderly healthcare utilization, health checkup programs' effects on self-employed workers, and the relationship between unemployment rates and child neglect. His research methodology primarily employs advanced econometric techniques including difference-in-difference propensity score matching and instrumental variable approaches.

As an educator, Kawamura teaches courses including Social Security Policy, Data Science for Social Security, Applied Econometrics for Policy Evaluation, and Introduction to Health Science and Social Welfare across undergraduate, graduate, and online degree programs. He serves as Principal Investigator on multiple research grants including JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research projects examining healthcare systems and long-term care sustainability.