Current Situation and Problems with Local Revitalization: Overview of the survey on the attitudes of local government staffs in charge of industrial development (Japanese)

We investigated how regional small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and regional financial institutions evaluate the economic policies of local governments. As the local governments are expected to play a "leading role" in terms of regional revitalization, we need to analyze how to achieve effective collaboration with private financial institutions, from the point of view of local governments. Both analyses from the regional financial institutions and the regional governments are necessary to capture the overall picture of the regional revitalization policy. Therefore, in February 2016, we conducted a survey on the consciousness of local public officers in charge of industrial and commerce development policy and obtained 500 responses. This paper reports the results of the survey. According to this survey, "Chamber of Commerce and Industry," "Designated Financial Institutions," and "Other Financial Institutions" are ranked as the three most important partners for regional revitalization. It is clear that many regional officers attach importance to regional financial institutions. Moreover, they responded that the most critical barrier to collaboration for financial institutions and local governments is that "knowledge on finance is scarce on the part of local government officials." Therefore, the lack of financial knowledge of local public officers should be addressed. Also, the response rate in smaller municipalities stating that "I have never worked together with financial institutions" shows a remarkably large value compared with larger municipalities. This suggests that the motivation of local revitalization and the awareness of the importance of the collaboration between financial institutions and local governments are different between small and large local governments. In order to realize regional revitalization through collaboration between local governments and financial institutions, it is essential for national and prefectural governments to support local governments accordingly based on their circumstances.