Overview of Social Policies for Town and Village Development in Response to Rural Shrinkage in East Asia: The Cases of Japan, South Korea and China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article is very interesting. Perhaps the abstract does not provide a clear idea of the method. Methodology and analysis are difficult to trace. Analyzing the data with a clear understanding of it will be easier for a reader to understand. The conclusion seems largely prescriptive. Thanks
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: The article is very interesting. Perhaps the abstract does not provide a clear idea of the method. Methodology and analysis are difficult to trace. Analyzing the data with a clear understanding of it will be easier for a reader to understand.
Response 1: Thank you for your comments. To make the methodology clearer, we have added detailed information about the qualitative methods and the process of study in both Abstract and 2.2 Methods part.
Point 2: The conclusion seems largely prescriptive.
Response 2: Thank you for yor suggestion. To improve the logic of conlusion part and make it more precise, we have restructured and separated the Section 7 into two parts. The first part is the Conculsions for the main contents of this paper, and the second part is the Discussions for international discourse on rural shrinkage development and prospect for future study.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I would like to ask authors to make two changes:
Change – from rural to urban
In Asia, a very substantial share of rural region amidst depopulation, which is simultaneously driven by the migration from urban to rural and the distorted age structures (Matanle,2016; Zhang, 2011).
Change – from avenue to revenue
In addition to the lack of human and material resources, the disruption of the endogenous capacity of rural communities is also reflected in the weakening of local economic capacity, particularly in terms of the avenue.
I would like to congratulate research team on selecting very important issue: the overall process of rural depopulation and the present features of town and village development. It is important to point cross country approach applied in this research. The research is very interesting and I see some similarities with situation in Western Balkan as well.
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: I would like to ask authors to make two changes: Change – from rural to urban. Change – from avenue to revenue.
Response 1: Thank you for pointing out the mistakes. We have corrected these two mistakes as you suggested and carefully checked other flaws.
Point 2: I would like to congratulate research team on selecting very important issue: the overall process of rural depopulation and the present features of town and village development. It is important to point cross country approach applied in this research. The research is very interesting and I see some similarities with situation in Western Balkan as well.
Response 2: Thank you for your approval and enlightment. We would love to continue our future researches on rural shrinkage development with broader global comparison.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you for the possibility to review the paper and thereby get a glimpse into the social policies established in response to rural shrinkage in East Asia countries. The article raises the question of development policies, divided between overcoming the problem of depopulation and adaptation to new conditions. The article draws attention, the researched problem has scientific potential and may be of interest to potential readers.
The paper must be proofread. For example, on page 8, the second paragraph says "the government was the responsibility for funding..."
I would like to draw attention to methodological flaws.
On page 2, the authors cite the German economist Adolf Wagner, but no source is given in the references.
Page 5, second paragraph, Figure 13 is mentioned in parentheses.
On page 9, the last paragraph, it says Figure 5, and it should be 6.
On page 13, in the first paragraph, there are brackets without the specified source in between.
This manuscript will benefit from professional language editing.
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: The paper must be proofread. For example, on page 8, the second paragraph says "the government was the responsibility for funding...".
Response 1: Thank you for pointing out the mistakes. We have corrected this mistake and carefully proofread the whole paper.
Point 2: I would like to draw attention to methodological flaws.
On page 2, the authors cite the German economist Adolf Wagner, but no source is given in the references.
On page 5, second paragraph, Figure 13 is mentioned in parentheses.
On page 9, the last paragraph, it says Figure 5, and it should be 6.
On page 13, in the first paragraph, there are brackets without the specified source in between.
Response 2: Thank you for pointing out the flaws. We have corrected all above mistakes by adding relevant references and sources and correcting numbers of figures. We have also carefully proofread the whole paper to revise other mistakes.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
1. The abstract needs to be rewritten and should mainly emphasize the main findings and innovations, with too much background presentation at present.
2. There should be a separate literature review section to compare the studies of domestic and foreign scholars and highlight the areas in which this paper can fill the existing gaps.
3. The choice of methods needs to be described in detail.
4. Chinese text appears on pages 4 and 9, which is not allowed in international journals.
5. Please restructure the paper to conform to the English journal format, which is currently still the Chinese paper format.
6. The discussion is placed in the results.
7. The format of references is not uniform.
Moderate editing of English language required
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: The abstract needs to be rewritten and should mainly emphasize the main findings and innovations, with too much background presentation at present.
Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion. We have revised the abstract by removing unnecessary background information, adding the main methodology, and further emphasizing the main findings and innovations.
Point 2: There should be a separate literature review section to compare the studies of domestic and foreign scholars and highlight the areas in which this paper can fill the existing gaps.
Response 2: Thanks for the kind suggestion. We strongly agree the importance of literature review. However, due to the limited length of the paper, we have to integrate the content of literature review into the Introduction part. Therefore, we have pointed out that “either in the practice or academic researches, growth-oriented rural development theory and initiative have long been the focus” while “few researches have taken a deep insight into the growing importance of social mech-anisms in dealing with the issue of rural shrinking”, and “although a number of articles have discussed rural policies of these three countries separately, there is a relative lack of comprehensive study involving East Asian coun-tries in cross-country studies”. Therefore, this paper can fill the existing gaps by putting the specific focus on social policies and conduting systematic cross-country study of three countries, and further promote the international comparative study of social policies in response to rural shrinkage
Point 3: The choice of methods needs to be described in detail.
Response 3: Thanks for your suggetion. We have improved the description of methods in “2.2 Methods” part. In this paper, we have mainly adopted the qualitative methods by a combination of literature review, information gathering and policy review, and field surveys. We have also futher illustrated the details of three approaches respectively.
Point 4: Chinese text appears on pages 4 and 9, which is not allowed in international journals.
Response 4: Thank you for the reminder and we have deleted all the Chinese text.
Point 5: Please restructure the paper to conform to the English journal format, which is currently still the Chinese paper format.
Response 5: Thank you for the suggestion. Basically we have strucutred the paper into 6 sections corresponding to general English journal content. Given that it is a qualitative research-based paper, we have refered to similar research papers in Sustainability (see “The Role of the Sharing Economy for a Sustainable and Innovative Development of Rural Areas: A Case Study in Sardinia (Italy)”, 2019, 11(11), https://doi.org/10.3390/su11113004; “A Review of Policy Framework Research on Promoting Sustainable Transformation of Digital Innovation”2023,15(9) https://doi.org/10.3390/su15097169.) and figured it better to organize the paper structure with main opinions in order to give a clear clue of research outcomes.
Point 6: The discussion is placed in the results.
Response 6: Thank you for the comment. To improve the logic of conlusion part, we have restructured and separated the Section 7 into two parts. The first part is the Conculsions for the main contents of this paper, and the second part is the Discussions for international discourse on rural shrinkage development and prospect for future study.
Point 7: The format of references is not uniform.
Response 7: Thanks for the suggestion. We have reorganized and unified the format of references according to the requirement of the journal.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 5 Report
I would like to thank the authors for their intersting work. Little is known in Europe about shrinking population in east Asia and the paper is supported by proper scientific work. My suggestions to improve the paper before publication are as follows:
Please refer more to the "rest of the word" situation about rural population trends in order to have a general comparison on the causes and the performances of dynamics in Asia. Are they following the same patterns? is rural vitalities a polcy issue in the countries studied)? is quality of life generally improving? Is multifunctional agriculture helping in keeping people in rural areas? Are there specific policy tools implemented in S. Korea, Japan and China, something like Rural Development Programmes? some references about this would help the reader. There are many authors in Europe as well as in North America working on these issues.
It would improve the quality of the paper to compare also the three cases presented: how they differ to each other and in what are they similar? here and there something comes out, especially in the conclusions, but would be very intersting to have a regular comparison of the three interesting cases rather then have them presented consecutevly.
One issue could be that of identifying 2 or 3 very relevant "problems" about rural areas and shrinking population, particularly significant in the areas interested by the study, and present how S. Korea, China and Japan are facing that specific issue (if it is a problem at all).
Tables could also be reorganised according to specific issues. Figure 6 and 7 could be improved, they are not very clear as they are at the moment.
English needs moderated check, not so much for the spelling but for the construction of some sentences.
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: Please refer more to the "rest of the word" situation about rural population trends in order to have a general comparison on the causes and the performances of dynamics in Asia. Are they following the same patterns? is rural vitalities a policy issue in the countries studied? is quality of life generally improving? Is multifunctional agriculture helping in keeping people in rural areas? Are there specific policy tools implemented in S. Korea, Japan and China, something like Rural Development Programmes? some references about this would help the reader. There are many authors in Europe as well as in North America working on these issues.
Response 1: Thank you for your valuable suggestions. Those are all important and critical questions, which are also difficult to reply in one article. As a positive response, we first added some information of global rural shrinkage situation, especially in Europe and Asia, in the first paragraph in Introduction part. To emphasize the severe problem that East Asian countires are facing, more information about the population trends of studied countries has been added in the third paragraph. In addition, more references about rural revalitazaion policy studies both in Asian countries and European countries have been added (such as ref17: Bock, B.B. and Haartsen, T. Who is Afraid of Population Decline? The Struggle of Keeping Rural Depopulation on the Dutch Agenda. Journal of Depopulation and Rural Development Studies 2021, 33, 35-56. Ref 18:Li, Y.H.; Westlund, H.; Liu, Y.S. Why some rural areas decline while some others not: An overview of rural evolution in the world. J Rural Stud 2019, 68,135-143), to help get access to more revelant studies.
Point 2: It would improve the quality of the paper to compare also the three cases presented: how they differ to each other and in what are they similar? here and there something comes out, especially in the conclusions, but would be very interesting to have a regular comparison of the three interesting cases rather than have them presented consecutively.
Response 2: Thank you for the suggestion and we appreciate it very much. We agree that it is very necessary to have a comparison with policies in three contries. In this paper, we have distilled four major policy orientions and further concluded simmlarities and differences in the Conclusions and Discussions. Some opinions have been added in the revised paper, such as “An overview of relevant policies shows a common trend in social policies in these three countries, that is the scope of policies is not limited to boosting the population growth, but also to accept and adapt to the changing dynamics, respond early to new opportunities, and contribute to the sustainable development of towns and villages”. However, we are also concerned that details would be missed if we focus too much on the comparisons in the whole article, and as a review article, we would like to provide much information since there hasn’t been enough papers introducing the social policies in East Asian countries. Therefore, we have kept the main structure of this paper and we are willing to do more research work on the comparisons in Asian countires in our future study.
Point 3: One issue could be that of identifying 2 or 3 very relevant "problems" about rural areas and shrinking population, particularly significant in the areas interested by the study, and present how S. Korea, China and Japan are facing that specific issue (if it is a problem at all).
Response 3: Thank you for your suggestion. In 3.2 we have identified the main features of shrinking rural areas and some pressing problems towns and villages are facing in all three countries, including the vacancy of housing and public facilities, farmland abandonment, and decline in endogenous community capacity. Specific policies have been implemented to deal with these problems as have mentioned in the article, including the re-use of empty facilities and houses, the introduction of new farmers to rural, the strengthening of endogenous impetus. Some revisions of expressions have been made to make the correspondence between “problems” and “solutions” clearer. In addition, we think that there is a growing tendency that social policies are targeted for comprehensive goals and are proposed in a holistic framework.
Point 4: Tables could also be reorganised according to specific issues. Figure 6 and 7 could be improved, they are not very clear as they are at the moment.
Response 4: Thank you for reminding. We have adjusted some of the contents in tables and redrawn Figure 6 and 7. Hope they can be more clearly to be understood now.
Point 5: English needs moderated check, not so much for the spelling but for the construction of some sentences.
Response 5: Thank you for your suggestion. We have proofread the paper thoroughly and made careful modifications to the expressions and sentences.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 4 Report
Accept in present form
Author Response
Point 1: Accept in present form.
Response 1: Thank you for your kind approval.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 5 Report
the paper is substantially improved and I thank the authors for taking on board all the sugegstions proposed. I would only reccomend to stress more clearly if the issue of shrinking population is specific of rural areas or it is a more general problem. The issue is not totally clear to me yet and I think in Eueope it is not preceived as a dominant problem for Eastern Asia countries. So I would suggest to stress even more celarly in the intro to what extent that is a general issue and if there is a specific problem in the rural areas. as opposed to large metropolitan areas.
Other than that, in my opinion the paper is suitable for publication.
no specific comments on this.
Author Response
We’d like to thank the reviewer for all the constructive comments and suggestions. We have carefully revised the manuscript according to your suggestions. Our responses to the comments are listed below.
Point 1: The paper is substantially improved and I thank the authors for taking on board all the sugegstions proposed. I would only reccomend to stress more clearly if the issue of shrinking population is specific of rural areas or it is a more general problem. The issue is not totally clear to me yet and I think in Europe it is not preceived as a dominant problem for Eastern Asia countries. So I would suggest to stress even more celarly in the intro to what extent that is a general issue and if there is a specific problem in the rural areas. as opposed to large metropolitan areas.
Other than that, in my opinion the paper is suitable for publication.
Response 1:. Thank you for your approval and kind suggestions. We agree that it should be more clearly clarified that depopulation is no longer a phenomenon exclusive to rural areas but also happens in urban, including large metropolitan areas in East Asian countries. Therefore we have modified some content in the intro and added relevant information about urban shrinkage. We think that “while the negative population growth in metropolitan cities that mainly started in recent 10 years in these countries is mostly due to natural decline with super aging and extremely low fertility (Naoko and Hiroko,2011), high living cost, and suppressed influx interventions in some situation (Joo and Seo,2018) (on the other hand, urban inflows from rural areas may happen simultaneously with urban outflows), rural shrinkage is the comprehensive outcome of national modernization and urbanization history”. We also have added some latest information about cases of urban depopulation in Japan, Korea and China. As this is not the focus of the paper, we have placed it in a footnote.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
