西ドイツ経済の空間的構成 : 株式会社本社立地の特性

Japan’s economic geographers of the younger generation have sought to explicate the so-called regional structure of their motherland. They consider it necessary in order to lay the foundation of adequate regional policy. Japan was suffering from tremendous regional problems, kamitsu and kaso, especially in 1960s and 1970s. Kamitsu means overcrowding literally, i.e. urban problems, while kaso means a too thinly scattered population because of villagers’ outmigration from remote regions toward urban agglomerations. The former is represented by difficulty of housing, urban transport congestion, upheaving land value, deficiency of public services and so on. The latter probably precipitates destruction of traditional community life and fear that entire villages in remote regions would be extinguished due to outmigration of younger inhabitants. These two regional problems are connected with each other, and it seems they are not yet resolved completely. Regional structure, in terms of a model formulated by Yada (1974), is a key concept to make the phenomena clear. It is a spatial reflection of national economy or one of capitalist structure of reproduction in the case of Japan. It is not, however, a direct outcome of the capitalist mode of reproduction, but there is a mediator between them. Yada (1974) thinks that locational processes of factories, offices, any other economic activities and infrastructures play a role. These ten years have seen a lot of papers from this viewpoint in Japan’s economic geography as a discipline. But most of them are concerned with Japan exclusively. Thus it is not yet clear if Japan’s experiences are typical for advanced capitalist national economies. In other words, we have not yet a comparative study of national economies from the viewpoint of regional structure. This paper aims to establish a bridgehead for this by conducting a case study of West Germany, i.e. the Federal Republic of Germany and Berlin (West). The present author focuses his attention on the locational pattern of joint-stock corporation headquarters by industrial sectors and the national economy as a whole, using Statistisches Bundesamt (1970) as a basic data source. The results by sectors are shown from Table 3 to Table 30, and Table 31 and figures from 3 to 6 indicate the summary and the entire pattern. On one hand, Japan has a pattern of one-point concentration in the primate city Tokyo, or a pattern of two foci of Tokyo and Osaka. Even in the latter case, Tokyo plays a dominant role with the exception of the textile industry. On the other hand, West Germany has an entirely different pattern, that of dispersion. It is remarkable that each sector has its own primate city, though Hamburg and a few of other major cities come first several times. As a result, West Germany has no national primate city in the real sense. If we consider the numerical strength of headquarters, the capital-stock scale and the population scale altogether, we find that Hamburg, Berlin (West), Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne and Düsseldorf take their position as a same and first rank, and Bremen, Hannover, Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Nuremberg as a second rank. It is true that headquarters are rather concentrated in the Rhine-Ruhr district, but this concentration is not heavy and headquarters are dispersed among major leading cities which are rather far away from each other. What has brought about such a pattern of no national primate city? Some advocates of regionalism in Japan explain it in terms of historical heritage, federalism as a politico-administrative system and Raumordnungspolitik (regional policy). The present author is not against their opinions. But he is afraid that they might miss some important historical reality. The Japan’s regionalists seek to explain the regional pattern of West Germany only from the viewpoint of federalism, regional policy or the kleinstaaterei (particularism). These factors are eventually political. We