ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The early twenty-first century has witnessed growing attention to the contribution of service industries to the processes of urban, economic and social development in the Asia-Pacific. Although industrialization was the dominant development paradigm amongst many Asia-Pacific nations for much of the second half of the twentieth century, during the 1990s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century services have become more deeply embedded in the regions economic growth and structural change. There is change of scale in where Noboru Hayashi examines the locational factors determining the location of software services across Japan. In addition to demonstrating the agglomeration of software services and its close relationship with the urban hierarchy, the intra-urban location of these services is also illustrated in considerable detail for the major cities, including Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama and Fukuoka.
