In this chapter we look at the spatial distribution of economic activities in China and Japan. Japan has excellent data and relatively uniform institutions since World War II, which allow us to track its spatial evolution and detail its key features today. For Japan we show how structural shifts in the national economy involved major transformations of the regional structure of economic activity. We address a central policy issue, the high extent of urban agglomeration in Tokyo. Then we turn to the details of the spatial distribution of industrial activity across cities, to see what general patterns hold and what they imply for our understanding of the role of different cities in the urban hierarchy. For China the approach is different. With the radical institutional changes since 1978 moving China away from being a planned economy, there is little consistency in data definitions and coverage over time and less detailed data are available. We focus on the last decade and on policy issues. We observe that Chinese cities tend to be overcapitalized and undersized, with strong spatial biases to policies, concerning migration, capital allocations, infrastructure allocations and location of FDI.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF This chapter was published in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.) Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, , chapter 65, pages 2911-2977, 2004.
Find related papers by JEL classification: R1 - Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics - - General Regional Economics
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)