In recent years, many industries in Japan have fallen into a deep recession and have tried to revitalize and restructure through locational adjustments. The purpose of this paper is to show that locational adjustments have played the decisive role in industrial restructuring of the petrochemical industry in Japan. The classical location theory could not take account of the restructuring process. Because it only focuses on a single plant location and a new one. When we study the restructuring in declining industries, it is important to focus on multi-plant locations and plant closures. This paper considers current locational adjustments which bring about transformation of industrial organization (ex. merger, integration and business alliance) in the petrochemical industry in Japan. The results are summraized as follows : 1. Many companies in the Japanese petrochemical industry are using the strategies of merger, integration and business alliance in order to keep plants allocation which formed in the period of the rapid growth. These plants allocation are optimal in terms of transpotation costs and distribution strategies, because, in Japan, many companies located plants in western and eastern markets each other to minimize their transpotation costs through the rapid growth period. In other words, these strategies have become means to close down plants efficiently. 2. There is a sharply difference between the restructuing in 80's and 90'S. In 80's, the restructuring process was initiated by the Japanese Government. In 90's, however, private firms have promoted restructuring according to each corporate strategies, and the Government has less important role in this restructuring process. Therefore the restructuring in 90's is more efficient in terms of transportation costs than one in 80's.

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There is little question about the importance of continuous innovation through R&D activities and of recruiting highly skilled labor forces for such activities for firms to remain competitive. In Japan, private R&D laboratories are highly concentrated in the Tokyo metropolitan area, whereas authoritative universities or technical institutes are dispersed over the nation. This paper examines the process whereby R&D engineers migrate to the Tokyo metropolitan area upon their graduation from institutes of higher education. The analysis is based on a mailed questionnaire survey to the members of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. About half of the R&D engineers who work in the Tokyo metropolitan area are originally from the outside of this area, and the majority of them came to the metropolitan area to begin their first jobs. In this process, regional central cities attract potential R&D engineers as university students and send them to various R&D labs in the Tokyo metropolitan area upon graduation. When students search for R&D jobs in the Tokyo metropolitan area, higher educational institutes play an important role in linking their students to enterprises in the metropolitan area. Students in regional central cities tend to find jobs through their supervisors in universities, while students in local cities do so through university job centers. These regional characteristics in job finding processes - ways of job finding embedded in the location of universities, to use the Granovetterian notion of "embeddedness" - affect the quality of jobs available for them. For students in local cities, university job centers function not only to link students to the metropolitan area, but also to compensate their relatively low educational levels and to provide decent employment opportunities. In higher education institutes in regional central cities, each professor's laboratory has connections with large enterprises, through which students can get a good job in these enterprises.

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In remote rural areas, the amount of public investment per capita is much larger than that in other areas. national/prefectual government disbursements for special purposes and local public loans function as regional income redistributers supplementing local allocation tax, which is a fiscal equalization system in Japan, and give strong influences on local governments' fiscal activities. This paper aims to clarify those functions quantitatively with special attention to their relations with public investment. This paper consists two parts, In the first part, we examine relations between public investment expenditure and municipal population. In the second part, we examine spatial patterns of public investment using several data of municipalities in Yamanashi Prefecture. The main findings are summarized as follows: 1) In municipalities with small population, the location quotient of public investment expenditure is much higher than that of basic fiscal needs during 1960-1993, which determines the distributional structure of the local allocation tax. One of its important reasons is that their ordinary balance ratio (Keijyo shushi hiritsu), which is used as an indicator of fiscal rigidity, is relatively low. 2) The variation of ordinary balance ratio among municipalities came to decrease after 1970. Its most important reason is that most of the municipalities tried to enlarge their public investment expenditure as possible as their fiscal capacities allows under the positive public investment policies by the national government in the 1970's. 3) In matching rate of national/prefectual government disbursements for special purposes and local public loans within public investment expenditure, only municipalities with small population have significant differences between Kaso designated municipalities and non-designated ones. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason is that allocation of Kaso loan, 70% of whose charge is granted through local allocation tax, is quasi-fixed and has little to do with the size of municipal population. The second reason is that land use and geomorphological conditions for agricultural infrastructure development are more important factors in regulating national/prefectual government disbursements for special purposes allocation than positive discrimination policies for Kaso designated area.

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[in Japanese]

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