Kosaka Naohito, Faculty of Economics

Abstract：Throughout Japan's modern history, Hokkaido has been viewed as a relatively backward region, and therefore an area that the government has been actively developing. Today, Japan's regional industrial development has reached its boundaries, with manufacturing production moving overseas on a large scale. More importantly, since the 1990s, Japan's local socio-economic development has fallen into a state of chronic weakness, and the progress of rapid oligomerization and aging has caused regional development to face a serious demographic bottleneck. Under these conditions, the task of regional economic and social development in Japan has shifted from "regional development" to "regional regeneration". Civil society organizations and scholars have put forward the ideas of "marginal settlements" and "disappearing regions," and have advocated the role of local governments in realizing local development through "regional innovation." These ideas have been incorporated into the government's decision-making, and a series of policies introduced by the Abe Cabinet since it came to power have included the promotion of "local regeneration". However, these policies have not centered on local autonomous efforts and local development, but rather on the central government's central line, and have not broken away from the old path of local resource development. The new local development should combine the unique local resource endowment with development, and in the energy sector, it is the development of renewable energy to realize sustainable local development. The use of renewable resources to generate electricity for "self-generation and self-consumption" is an important path.

Read the article here:            【可持续发展】日本北海道地区的资源禀赋与地区开发_历史与现状.pdf