Empirical Studies on the Administration and Finance of Metropolitan Areas in the Process of Urban Reconstruction

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1. The problem of hypercentralization to Tokyo, the nation's single core, reflects some new big changes of regional and urban economy and society in Japan. These changes have taken place interrelated with internationalization, high-tech, and service oriented shifts of economies, and the emergence of information society and aging society. This project has been an attempt to inversigate the contents, causes and significances of these changes focusing on their impacts to public finance. The research was done in two lines. One was the comparative survey between Tokyo and Osaka area, taking into account the recent situations of other metropolitan area like Nagoya, New York and so on as well. The other one was the reviewing and analysing the major studies and policy proposals for urban fiscal and tax reform of the last ten or fifteen years. This was done for the purposing new reform ideas on those matters.2. As our findings and ideas are shown in the two volume reports we made, here we would like to summarise the major agenda for the urban policy toward the next century which we formulated as the conclusion of our studies. (1) Policy responses to the changes of inner city areas, especially outsides Tokyo area. (2) Reform of fiscal structure in accordance with the service oriented transformation of industries (ex. taxing on the growing underground economies etc.). (3) Response to fiscal changes related with the aging of urban populations (needs for pension funds, health care, social welfare, conversion of urban facilities from the youngers' use to elderlys', losing of income tax bases, and so on). (4) Responses to infrastructure deterioration and rennovation of them. Especially fiscal measures for supporting the maintenance and rennovation of local infrastructures. (5) Establishing of the new fiscal devices for internationalization and internal information-cultural center functions of the cities (ex. taxing on amenities and so on).