Abstract
This research clarifies the relation between reform, restructuring of local governments' laboratories and their R&D policy, by taking local governments' laboratories for rural industry as cases. In Japan, rural industries prospered from 1935 to 1955 under the rural crisis before the war and shortage of food, destructed industry after the war, but they began to decline from round 1955 due to food industries' revival. Under this industrial construction change, local governments' laboratories for rural industries lost their raison d'etre and they were forced to reform and restructure themselves. The laboratories that focussed on non-industrial R&D like rural side-business and rural diet improvement faded out. However, the laboratories that gave priority to industrial R&D survived and developed to various types of laboratories, depending on their strategies. These cases show that R&D policy of local government's laboratory plays an important role to control course of reform and restructuring of the laboratory.
