 Regional convergence under declining population: The case of JapanShin-ichi Fukuda and Koki Okumura Japan and the World Economy, 2020, vol. 55, issue C Abstract: Using regional data from Japan, we examine how population growth affected regional convergence in Japan, where population decline has become conspicuous in several regions. The basic equation in the analysis allows two distinct features that previous studies rarely explored. First, we allow the coefficient of initial per capita output to change when the growth rate of population is lower than a threshold value. Second, we allow the growth rate of population to have ambiguous effects on the growth rate of per capita output. Our estimation results confirm the convergence hypothesis in Japan. However, we find that the declining speed of convergence was more conspicuous in the regions that had negative population growth. We also find that the decline in population growth, which was irrelevant for regional economic growth before 1995, came to have harmful impacts on regional economic growth after 1995. We believe this occurred because in societies with declining populations, economies of agglomeration had more significantly disappeared in poorer regions than in richer regions. Keywords: Convergence hypothesis; Population decline; Economies of agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:japwor:v:55:y:2020:i:c:s0922142520300025 DOI: 10.1016/j.japwor.2020.101023 Access Statistics for this article Japan and the World Economy is currently edited by Robert Dekle and Yasushi Hamao More articles in Japan and the World Economy from Elsevier |
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