RURAL RETAIL BUSINESS THRESHOLDS AND INTERDEPENDENCIES

The occurrence of rural retail activity may be related to the concept of threshold, which suggests the direct relationship between surroundi ng populations and the hierarchical functions provided. Empirical stud ies have typically examined individual categories of retail firm conce ntration or multiplication in isolation of the extent of other retail activities. This study develops models of retail business concentratio n for sparsely populated rural markets, and emphasizes proper statisti cal treatment of the discrete firm-count data The analytical approach specifies systems of multivariate count data models that can capture t he interdependencies among different types of retail firms. The degree of interdependence is tested and shown to be a significant statistica l feature of the model of rural retail firm counts.