The trends of socio-economic changes in depopulated regions indicated in statistics and the impacts of merger of municipalities

在这项研究中，代表(TsutSumi)致力于建立由区域统计数据和人口减少区域的市政合并统计数据组成的数据库。通过对这些地区社会经济变化的分析，过去我们可以很容易地认识到东日本和西日本模式的差异的情况已经改变为他们之间没有那么明显的差异，但四国地区的情况变得更加严峻。也很明显，合并后的小山区情况严重，必须注意处理小面积统计。

In this study, the representative (Tsutsumi) worked on building databases consisting of regional statistics and statistics on the municipal mergers of depopulated regions. As a result of an analysis of socio-economic changes concerning to these regions, the past situation that we could easily recognize the difference between patterns in the East Japan and the West Japan, has been changing into that there are not so clear differences between them, but the situation in Shikoku district has become severer. And also it became clear that there are serious conditions of small mountainous regions after the merger, and that we must take care of treatment of small area statistics.