Abstract

This study is aimed to explore the result of a questionnaire survey on the plant locations of Japanese manufacturing industries from 1997 to 2003 and the objective is to investigate the impact of infrastructure support on the incubation of new manufacturing plants and to identify the regional variety of the impact. The major finding is that there is a location factor consisting of various infrastructure supports and the role of infrastructure-based location factor varies across space. Also, this study found that the impact of the factor normally grows as infrastructure density rises; however the growth turns to a decline when population density is extremely high.

Key words: Industrial location, transport infrastructure, factor analysis, Japanese manufacturing.