Industry Equilibrium in T ransport- Oriented Production

Abstract

Few topics in regional science, or indeed in any social science that I am familiar with, have been investigated at such length as the equilibrium location for a firm. A survey published about ten years ago (Brown [1]) listed twenty-five papers written on the subject from 1971 to 1978 alone. Developments of the past three decades, however, have added little to the theory and, indeed, have robbed it of its substantive content. Moreover, the really interesting questions about firm location have yet to be asked. In this chapter I shall ask them and try to answer them as well.