The regional significance of retail

During the latest decades, retailing has been going through a period of extensive structural transformation. External retail areas have grown outside city centers, creating challenges for retailing  in both city centers  and suburbs. E-commerce has also increased its market share at the expense of traditional retailing, with major consequences for the geographical location of trade. Research that focuses on understanding these developments constitute one of our priority research areas at the Institute of Retail Economics.

These subjects have been studied in several research projects. In one of our completed projects, we have analyzed the importance of retail investments as a cause of regional growth. The results show that spillover effects due to entry by large retailers can create regional growth , especially in small and medium-sized cities. This is of major importance as industrial policy tends to be directed at supporting R&D-intensive industries, while few investments are targeting the retail industry. Within this research area, we have also conducted research on how municipalities are affected by new IKEA establishments, and how support for rural communities can be designed to ensure access to food retailing also in these remote regions.

In our ongoing research, we analyze the role of retailing for place attractiveness, by, for example, investigating how large retail establishments affect property values. We have also chosen to focus research on the challenge of how to create attractive city centers in smaller cities, in a time when retail activities are more and more concentrated in external retail areas.