Abstract
This paper presents the effect of social capital especially industrial infrastructure on the development of regional industries.
Based on the concept of “new economic geography”, we show the relationship of urban diversity and population size of the MAs. A comparative analysis between Japanese and American cities is presented using the Hirschman-Herfindahl index (HHI) to measure urban diversity. The result of correlation analysis of HHI and population size show that 118 Japanese MAs have approximately equal levels of urban diversity and do not clearly indicate a hierarchical nature with respect to population size and/or urban diversity.
This result should appeal the differences of the local structure, so we investigate the effect of the local industrial policy, so called “Zenkoku Sogo Kaihatsu Keikaku”. The object of this policy is equal development of Japanese regions. We guess no relationship of urban diversity and population size has been influenced by this policy. We investigate this hypothesis to use pooled data of 80 cities of 2-digit manufacturing industries.
We estimated labor demand function, the result of estimations show that the impact of social capital is very strong. But, equipment industries have not been affected by the stock of social capital.
