Industrial Location and City Size

Abstract

The main purpose of the paper is to show how employed labor force of various industries is related to city size and to explain the nature of city's economic activity. In so far as employment is a suitable measure of the industrial location, this study will reveal the relative importance of the location of industries for the urban economic structure.Objectives treated are about 400 cities with population of more than 30 thousands in the non-metropolitan regions of Japan, and 1955 Census of Population, 1956 Census of Manufacturing and 1957 Census of Establishment are examined, and the labor force ratio by industries in each city grouped by their size is calculated. Five lines in each figure show 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentile of distribution respectively.Three groups of industries are distinguished. The first group includes all service industries, contruction and market-oriented manufacturing industries. Percentage of labor force in these industries increase in higher grade of city size. The second one consists of agriculture and other resource extractive industries, relative numbers engaged in such industries falls regularly when the city becomes larger. The third group includes other manufacturing industries, in this case no clear relations are found between city size and location of economic activities.The general trends observed are as follows.1) Small cities tend to be much more specialized but much less diversified in their economic activities than larger cities. The fact that variation of industrial structures is small in large cities shows that the latter tend to be self-sufficient and to have well balanced economy.2) The ratio of laborers of service industries has a very close connection with the urban population size. The strong correlation of city size with number of laborers engaged in the first group of industries will suggest the existence of central place hierarchical system.3) Viewed from commerce and trade, small cities serve generally their narrow, local markets, but large cities serve not only their own markets but supply goods and services to small regional centers. Viewed from production, small cities as well as large ones display manufacturing activities to the nation-wide market through their functions of specialised industries.4) Location of manufacturing industries in cities of different sizes are limited by the extent of market area and the amount of demands. As a result the number of employment in each manufacturing industrie is limited by city size, strictly in the so-called “ubiquitous” industries and weakly in the “sporadic” ones.5) Index number of urbanization is relatively low in the industry of raw material production or of simple process, whereas it is considerably high in that of final products or of already processed materials. The phenomena seems to be resulted from the fact that originally market-oriented character of industry is more clearly revealed of the latter which are restricted less by the uneven distribution of natural resources.