Advancement in Industrial Structure and Spatial Changes of Establishment Location in the City of Nagoya

Abstract

With shifts in economic development from the higher growth of the mid-fifties and sixties into the stable growth that has continued from the early seventies, the Japanese industrial structure has changed drastically. While the relative status of secondary industry has decreased, tertiary industry has developed a great deal. Changes in industrial structure, however, do not mean only such changes in the components between industries. As the value of information and services in the economy has become more important than that of physical production, the position of service activities has risen not only in tertiary industry but also in primary and secondary industries. Therefore, studies which focus on the spatial changes of economic activities which have happened along with the advancement of industrial structure have to be done from the point of view of the functional roles of these activities within industries as well as the traditional classification of industries.The most advanced industrial structures can be seen in metropolises, among which Nagoya, the study area of this paper, is included. The spatial structures of these metropolises, which developed along with the industrialization of the postwar high economic growth period, have gradually been reorganized in accordance with changes in their industrial structure. This study attempts to reveal such temporal and spatial reorganization of economic activities in the City of Nagoya. Its main purpose is to grasp the general trends in spatial distribution of establishments categorized not only by kinds of industries but also by functional types.Analysis of the component changes of establishments by kinds of industries shows that the percentages of service, construction, wholesale, transportation-communication, and finance-insurance have increased in more than half of 14 wards during the period from the end of the sixties to the mid-eighties. Component shares of manufacturing and retail, however, have decreased in many wards during the same period. Wholesale and service have increased in number of workers as well as number of establishments, but the number of both categories has dropped a great deal in manufacturing. The decrease of workers in manufacturing has been accelerated by the outflow of large factories from the city. In the retail sector, the number of establishments has decreased, but the number of workers has continued to increase. The sectoral pattern, which can be seen in such spatial changes of establishments, suggests that wards located in certain sectoral direction from the city center reveal similar patterns of change.The second analysis was carried out on the spatial changes of establishments that were categorized by both industry and function. This analysis revealed that while office and business type firms have greatly increased in number all over Nagoya, factory, workshop and mining type firms have decreased remarkably. Store and restaurant type firms, which increased in the seventies, have decreasd in absolute number in the wards around the city center during the eighties. Office and business type firms, which employed nearly half of all workers in the mid-eighties are found not only in tertiary industry like wholesale and service but also in primary and secondary industry. These office and business type firms, which have developed to become a leading sector of the metropolitan economy, have increased in number mainly in the central and eastern wards of the city.It is necessary to grasp the general trends of firm distribution in order to build an empirical model of the regional structure of metropolises. For this reason, in the latter part of this study, an attempt was made to reveal the trends of firm distribution by means of regional concentration coefficients. In addition to this, the grouping of establishment types in terms of their locational pattern is attempted, and regional classification is carried out using this result.