NIIGATA, Japan and Europe need to address a common problem: the gap between an overconcentration of wealth, and amenities, in large urban areas compared with their rural communities, experts and journalists agreed at a recent conference.
The EU-Japan Journalists' Conference in Niigata, hosted by the Delegation of the European Commission to Japan, brought together some 30 journalists, bureaucrats and scholars from Europe and Japan from April 4 to 5 to discuss ways to narrow the gaps between the regions.
In the EU, interregional gaps are a fact of life. The wealth of tiny Luxembourg, for example, is seven times greater than Romania in terms of per capita income.