ABSTRACT
Local autonomy was a product of mutual concessions made during the processes of historical development, at both the centre and periphery. Therefore, the nature of the government systems was local in orientation. By contrast, the state-building of modern Japan was central by nature. In the absence of a powerful urban commercial interest, the homogeneous culture and race gave Meiji leaders a head start to become a modern state in a solidly unified fashion. A general survey of public finance serves as a means of structuring an analysis of growth in governmental fiscal size in postwar development, and how fiscal need may have affected the status and management of local public finance. Some indicators of government financial statistics are inherently comparative. In comparative perspective, one crude general indicator of the relationships between levels of government can be found in the variation in local government spending as a percentage of total public spending.
