1991 Reports

Commuting and land prices in the Tokyo metropolitan area

Hatta, Tatsuo; Ohkawara, Toru

The present study has three major aims. First, we will study differences in the population and employment distributions of Tokyo and New York, and examine how the different commuting environments of the two areas explain these distributions. As the Mills-Muth theory shows, the population density function in the residential district of a city has an intimate relationship with the land price function there. The employment density function in the CBD also has a close relationship with the land price function there. Although data on land prices are not available for New York, population and employment density data are available for both Tokyo and New York. Second, we will empirically examine the impact of abolishing the preferential tax treatment of free commuter riding upon the land price structure and the size of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Third, we will evaluate the current urban economic policies in Tokyo regarding the CBD development and commuter transportation from the view point of whether they help attain an efficient resource allocation. It will be shown that the various existing policies have consistently made both population and employment density distributions flatter than efficiency requires.