地域間人口移動と住宅投資需要

抄録

Throughout the almost three decades since World War II, the Japanese economy has been characterized by the active pursuit of economic growth. The postwar economic spurt contributed to the increasing income per capita, while it caused several kinds of difficult urban problems such as land use, housing, transportation and environment.
Since the housing problem has been regarded as one of the most crucial urban problems, the public sector has diligently encouraged to allocate more resources for housing both by the subsidies for housing service demands and by the financial support to private housing investment. Such housing accumulation supported by the public sector would mean the improvement of housing shortage. However, it is plausible to suggest this accumulation would motivate more labor flow, more migration, from rural to urban areas, which has been made the housing problem worse. So far, this feature of housing policy has been investigated empirically by few authors.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate this problem, both theoretically and empirically. After surveying the movement of housing market and the housing policy, we shall present any econometric model, which will be so cautiously built as to evaluate empirically the effects of alternative housing policies. Estimating the complete set of structural equations in our model, we examine the economic implications.