ABSTRACT
Could rural areas improve their sustainability or forestall their decline? Although the regional income disparity has been a long-run development issue of concern since the seminal work of Williamson (1965), the necessity of solving the problem of a regional crisis through depopulation and aging, which is leading to an unsustainable society, has been increasingly asserted in Japan (Abe and Alden 1988; Masuda 2014). However, forecasting regional situations fairly depends on population projections, and the effects of other factors in regional sustainability have not been fully considered for a comprehensive understanding (e.g., climate change, depletion of natural resources, and loss of health in human capital).
