ABSTRACT
Spatial problems have been neglected in economic theory, and the field of spatial economics is relatively uncharted. Historically, the theory of firm location was first developed by Weber (I 909), whose work went unnoticed until Hoover drew attention to it in the later 1940s. Hoover (I 948) improved many aspects of the theory and introduced a greater measure of reality . During the 1950s further additions were made to the structure of this theory, of which the most noteworthy contribution came from Isard (1956) who demonstrated the unity of the theory with classical economics-of-substitution analysis and also extended its scope to cover regional analysis. This led to the development of theories of market areas such as Perroux's (1950) growth poles, which bear a close relation to the work of LOsch ( 1944), who developed the theory of central place in order to explain the empirical regularities of economic regions.
