2022 Volume 17 Issue 2 Pages 303-318
This paper focuses on the “Regional Future Projections” proposed in the Report on the Local Administration System Necessary to Respond to Emerging Issues from around 2040 released by the 32nd Local System Research Council in June 2020. This study conducted a questionnaire survey of municipalities in the Tokyo metropolitan area regarding their fiscal management and used quantification theory III to examine the relationships among awareness of the financial situation, future projections, and wide-area cooperation. The findings of this study can be summarized as follows. 1) Municipalities that recognize their financial situation as healthy and conduct long-term future forecasting tend to be reluctant to engage in wide-area cooperation. 2) Despite the perceived need for future projections around 2040, many municipalities tend not to make such projections or only make short-term ones. 3) In the case of wide-area cooperation in finance, there are differences in awareness among the constituent municipalities. The above findings suggest that the national government and prefectures need to provide support to municipalities in fiscal forecasting, and that the exchange of information through horizontal cooperation among municipalities is important in regional future projections.
