Analysis of public finance issues by self-organizing maps and their further development as analytical tools : Applications of the Self-Organizing Map.

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The Self-Organizing Map(SOM), devised by T.Kohonen in the 1980s, was already broadly applied to various fields of science in the 1990s, including engineering, agriculture and, medicine. Furthermore, its application has also started in social sciences.The main purpose of this research, based on our previous studies on the SOM*s application to public finance in Japan, is to examine its applicability and effectiveness as analytical tool.Used together with other analytic methods, the SOM is useful to analyze important financial issues, such as(1) budgetary transfer processes, (2)efficiency of the expenditure of local governments, (3)financial planning of local governments based on population structure, and (4)correlation between economic performance and political systems.Concerning international institutions, the SOM reveals its effectiveness in analyzing EU issues and could be equally applied to the analysis of other regional organizations. As for its practical application, the SOM contributes to the construction and improvement of diagnosis systems.