STUDY ON STRUCTURE OF POPULATION IN SMALL CITIES IN A PROVINCIAL AREA BY ANALYZING POPULATION AND DID POPULATION

This paper defines two types of small cities in a provincial area (SCP), namely a merged city and a existing city ; and makes clear a relation between its population and DID population, and its transitional change after a reorganization caused by a merger of old administrative areas (kyusons), Conclusions are as follows. (1) An average merged city consists of 6.5 kyusons, and an average existing city consists of 5.6 kyusons. Though the merged city has more kyusons than the existing city, the merged city has less DID population than the existing city, and this difference is almost equal to that of population of both types of SCP. (2) With regard to the transitional change of the population, the DID population and the percentage of DID population, the merged city has less differences among provinces than the existing city. (3) In both types of SCP, the percentage of DID population in each period of a national census has been related to that of 1960, just after the reorganization of kyusons. Therefore, the population and the DID population of each SCP have not been changing independently, but changing relating together to show a correlation to the percentage of DID population in 1960. (4) In both types of SCP, a high correlation has been found between the population and the DID population. It means that if a SCP has bigger DID population, it has bigger percentage of its DID population and small percentage of its hinterland population ; thus DID has increasingly important meaning.