The Characteristics and Locational Patterns of Wholesale and Service Trades in the Central Area of Singapore

Retail location theory: evolution and evaluation

“…Studies undertaken (a) in a number of different countries, such as the US (Lord and Wright 1981), Sweden (Artle 1959), Singapore (Wing and Lee 1980) and Australia Uohnson 1967); (b) using all manner of statistical procedures including centrography (Sorenson 1970), factor analysis (White 1975), nearest neighbour (Sherwood 1970) and quadrat analysis (Rogers 1969); and (c) referring to a wide range of retailing trades -butchers (Shaw 1978), ~ banks (Okabe et al 1985), restaurants (Smith 1985) and petrol stations (Lee and Schmidt 1980), to name but a few -all appear to agree that sellers of the same or similar categories of merchandise tend to cluster closely together. There is a general consensus, moreover, that the degree of clustering is inversely related to the order of the good (Kivell and Shaw 1980).…”