要旨：中心市街地やそこに存在する商店街は、従来、まちの顔、賑わい、出会いの場、治安など、さまざまな機能を似ない、これは外部経済効果を有するものであった。近年の中心市街地の衰退により、この貴重な機能を担うことが難しくなっており、それを、市民、ボランティア、他地域企業などの新たな担い手が代わりに担う努力をしなければ、地域全体の損失となる。具体例として旧清水市の七夕を取り上げ、各地の七夕との比較しながら議論する。

要旨：京都には、ハイテク有名大企業と産学連携に積極的な大学の集積があるが、中小企業には産業クラスター（産業集積の中に産学連携や新製品開発目的の企業間連携が発達したものとして定義）形成の担い手となりうる企業はどのくらい存在するであろうか？本報告では、「平成15年度京都市ものづくり産業調査」の個票データを用い、首都圏西部のTAMA地域に見られる製品開発型中小企業との比較も踏まえ、京都市の機械金属系製造業の中小企業の研究開発や産学連携に関する分析結果を紹介し、京都が産業クラスターとして発展するための課題を検討する。なお、本報告は、平成１７年度に独立行政法人経済産業研究所から京都大学への委託事業として作成した「産業クラスターに関する研究事業に係る調査研究報告書」を活用して行う。

要旨：The purpose of this paper is to examine how the transportation costs of final good and intermediate goods influence on the location of firms. We develop a three-region model in which the production of final good requires differentiated intermediate goods. Although a region provides lower labor cost, when the transportation cost of intermediate goods is high, no firms relocates to that region. However, as the transportation costs of intermediate goods becomes lower, firms in the final good sector relocate to that region and launch assembly production with intermediate goods imported from the other region.

要旨：This paper studies the conditions for the consolidation of political jurisdictions. We focus on the tradeoff between the scale merit and the heterogeneity of preference among residents. That is, large jurisdictions enjoy the benefit of scale but must incur the cost due to the increment of heterogeneity among their populations. In addition to this, the land public ownership yields the strategic interaction: the agreement of the consolidation of some towns induce the consolidation of remaining towns. Our model implies that i) the consolidation might be too much observed under the decentralized regime; ii) observed number of the consolidation might be inefficiently large.

要旨：We construct a framework in which public infrastructures that reduce transportation costs are explicitly introduced in new economic geography models in which the sectors with vertical linkages are concentrated in a limited number of countries. Using this framework, we consider the outcome of the public-infrastructure-provision games by welfare-maximizing governments. In the model, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium does not necessarily exist. We show that there exists a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in which the public infrastructure investments by a country lacking a sector with vertical linkage have much larger variance than those by a country hosting the sector. The less industrialized country has the incentive to outlay tremendous amounts of public infrastructure investment to attract the sector within its own borders. Consequently, the relocation of an industry with vertical linkage can occur with a small but definitely positive probability.

要旨：In East Asia, international production/distribution networks have developed and have explosively increased intra-regional trade particularly in intermediate goods. This paper examines whether home bias for intermediate goods gets smaller than that for finished goods in the 1990s. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, differences in location advantages, for which we use differences in per capita GDP as a proxy, are more effectively utilized in intermediate goods transactions. Second, the home bias for intermediate goods has been at the same level as that for finished goods. Particularly in 1995, the home bias in all countries is not smaller for intermediate goods than for finished goods.