The recent transformation of Japanese industrial structure can be characterized by the remarkable growth in service industry, in particular producer services. The producer services are concentrated into large cities, especially, in the Tokyo metropolitan area at a national scale. Similarly, the concentration of producer services are recognized in regional metropolises at a regional scale and in prefectural capitals at a prefectural scale, respectively. It has been pointed out that the agglomeration of producer services would have become a key factor of urban growth. Therefore, I examine the location of producer services to understand the differences in growth among the Japanese cities. Some of producer services have been developed as parts of management functions of the firms. Recently those services have been externalized from management functions; this institutional division would be a crucial factor of the rapid development of producer services. Therefore, it is considered that producer services would function as a part of economic management. This article attempts to clarify the structural change of Japanese urban systems through the examination of the location of producer services, and to investigate their change through analyzing the data in the Establishment Census, 1981-1991. The findings are summarized as follows: 1. Producer services have been concentrated in Tokyo at a national scale. Tokyo Metropolitan Area had more than one-third of the total number of employee in this industry. 2. Similar concentrations of producer services in regional cities are observed at a regional scale and prefectural capitals in the Tohoku region, which is used as a case study region in this paper. However, the process of concentration of producer services is different among regions. In Yamagata prefecture, it is not clear that producer services concentrate into prefectural capital. The concentration in prefectural capitals are not simplified and generalized. 3. There are large disparities among hierarchies in urban system in the agglomeration and function of producer services. The spatial pattern of producer services has corresponded with the hierarchy of cities.
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