Inter-regional Movement of Population and the Social Security for the Aged

Abstract

In Japan, the inter-regional movement of population which has flowed from the rural areas to urban districts was most active during 1960's. The central part of such movement was young people newly entering to the labor forces which compose of 15-24 age class in local agricultural prefectures. They were mainly absorbed to manufacturing industries and the related business in urban big cities such as Tokyo and Ohsaka and their neighboring prefectures. There they have worked to increase manufacturing production and then contributed to promote the economic growth in the urban prefectures concerned. On the other hand, such population movement has naturally raised the ratio of the aged to the total population in the rural prefectures and then the burden for the young to support the aged there would be heavier if there is no adjusting measures to equalize the income differentials in inter-prefectures. To decrease such income differentials and to maintain the minimum standard of people's life in nationwide, it is necessary to redistribute: taxes imposed more in relatively rich industrial prefectures to the low income agricultural prefectures as transfers through the central fiscal system. This can be observed in the subsidies from the central to the local government and the items of public welfare appeared in local government expenditure. The author particulaly picked up two prefectures of Shimane and Saitama as the sample of agricultural-rural and industrial-urban type of prefectures respectively and analysed the effects of population movement from the viewpoint of social security.