Effect of Regional Innovation Policy on Regional Revitalization: Does the Cluster Policy Have an Impact on Business Start-up Rate?(in Japanese)

As a policy for revitalizing regional economies and strengthening global internationalcompetitiveness of domestic industries, industrial cluster policy has drawn attention. Althoughaims of the policy are to create environments for the emergence of new business and industries,and support regional innovation and form industrial agglomerations through the cooperationamong government, industry and academia, policy outcomes for regional revitalization remainto be fully empirically elucidated. This paper thus attempts to examine the impact of clusterpolicies ("Knowledge Cluster Initiative" and "City Area Program") on the start-up rate of privatefirms as a measure of regional revitalization. The result shows that factors such as the demandfor new firms, capital accumulation, and local government support promote regional business start-ups. Also, it indicates that cluster policies boost the business start-up rate, and policy effectis larger as the period since the start of the policy implementation is longer.