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Introduction
The retail sector consists of activities that are highly location-sensitive. Interaction between consumers and retailers in the sector require stores to be located in close proximity to consumers. Given that all stores should have the same objective, some more than others, we can expect a certain degree of agglomeration in every retail market where stores are co-located. We know that many of the stores are likely to be found in regional centres, whereas some are found in close proximity to such centres depending on their function, as well as their size. The determinant behind their location pattern is mostly driven by the fact that services provided by retailers are not always likely to be carried far away from the original location where they are provided. However, the intensity of interaction between retailers and consumers are variable depending on the type of retailing activity in question. Hence the agglomeration in retailing should not work in identical ways for every retail service. This implies we should find some retail services to be co-located in space, but not all. Using spatially disaggregated data, this paper aims to shed some light over this co-location phenomena in retail sector, where we investigate the location similarities for all kinds of physical retailing activities to identify how they are co-located in space.
Identifying an overall pattern of retail co-location is useful in numerous ways. When individual sector actors are aiming to determine the optimal location for their stores, there is a lack of understanding of the way the entire retail market is organised. Likewise, when it comes to retail planning, zoning policies for retail space, and/or government led retail development acts, capturing the regularities in co-location of similar and different retailers would provide policy makers with useful insights.
It is fair to say that retail markets are very dynamic, since they need to be fast in their response to the changes in the economy for survival. This dynamic nature of retailing is of particular importance for the location pattern of different kinds of stores. Changes in the market, hence in retail location, occur within very short time horizons. We have seen examples of rapid transformation in the retail landscape in countries with advanced economies over the past decades. Retailing firms got...