net migration accounts for only 6% of the cause. Meanwhile, natural increase ac counts for about 59% and increase owing to reclassification accounts for 35%. Although the causes differ from region to region, natural increase is the great est cause when seen as a country. It means that urban population is growing ver y rapidly in the Philippines and that natural increase is the greatest cause. I n other words, natural increase rate has risen all the way to 59% as a result o f higher birth rate and lower mortality rate and becoming a major factor in inc rease of population particularly urban population.

This issue of reclassification has occurred in other countries, and Japan is no exception. After the World War II, the Government was very concerned about smal l towns and vil-lages because their tax base was undermined as a result of youn g people moving to large cities. For this reason, the Govemment encouraged inte gration of small local towns into adjacent cities from a financial standpoint.

In the Philippines, the Government created rules for promoting Barangay to citi es during the '70s. In doing so, the Government took population size, populatio n density and so-cioeconomic factors into consideration, but the greatest empha sis was placed on popula-tion size and promoted such small communities to citie s when population density reached a certain level. After this started in the '7 0s, urban population in the Philippines in-creased in the '80s and '90s as a re sult of this reclassification, although natural increase is also significant.

As for distribution of population, many islands comprising the Philippines have local cultures of their own. At any rate, the Government wanted to avoid excess ive concen-tration of population in Manila and prevent Metropolitan Manila fror n becoming bigger and bigger. Manila had a population of 8 million and the Gove rnment was concerned about excessive concentration of population. Japan also ex perienced the same problem. Concentration of population in certain area is a pr oblem that often occurs in primate cit-ies. Thailand, for instance, is encourag ing decentralization because population is con-centrated excessively in the Ban gkok Metropolitan Area. The Government is inviting industries to local areas un der the slogan of local development. The Philippines adopted the policy of admi nistrative reclassification to urge people and industry to move out of Luzon Is land and go to Mindanao and other islands by offering subsidies. Luzon is an is land located in the northern part of the Philippines that has the capital city of Manila.

It was quite early in the '60s and '70s that this population decentralization p olicy started in the Philippines. The present distribution of population by reg ion shows some very interesting results. For instance, Metropolitan Manila has been absorbing a large amount of population over many years but its production increase rate from 1 980 to 1 990 shows a decline in growth rate. The growth ra te that marked 5% during the I O year pe-riod from 1960 to 1970 has gone down t o 3%. The Government uses an interesting ex-pression called "metropolitan shado w" when it refers to the regions neighboring Metro-politan Manila. It may be eq uivalent to the suburb of Metropolitan Manila. These are the regions where rapi d population growth is taking place in the recent years. The growth rate is 6.1 %, which is twice as high as Metropolitan Manila. This is a very in-