What factors have caused Japanese prefectures to attract a larger population influx?

TL;DR

This study analyzes various economic, climatic, amenity, and human factors influencing population inflow to Japanese prefectures, highlighting the importance of multifaceted regional promotion strategies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive correlation and regression analysis identifying key factors affecting population attraction in Japanese prefectures, emphasizing multifactorial approaches.

Findings

Economic, climatic, amenity, and human factors all correlate with population inflow.

Models combining multiple factors have higher explanatory power.

Regional promotion should target diverse factors beyond just economic incentives.

Abstract

Regional promotion and centralized correction in Tokyo have long been the goals of the Government of Japan. Furthermore, in the wake of the recent new coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic, the momentum for rural migration is increasing, to prevent the risk of infection with the help of penetration of remote work. However, there is not enough debate about what kind of land will attract the population. Therefore, in this paper, we will consider this problem by performing correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis with the inflow rate and the excess inflow rate of the population as the dependent variables, using recent government statistics for each prefecture. As a result of the analysis, in addition to economic factor variables, variables of climatic, amenity, and human factors correlated with the inflow rate, and it was shown that the model has the greatest explanatory power when multiple factors were used in addition to specific factors. Therefore, local prefectures are required to take regional promotion measures focusing on not only economic factors but also multifaceted factors to attract the outside population.