F— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 131 



as well as that of Weber, Mr. Dennison concludes that ' a review of the 

 various theories of location shows quite clearly the lack of any concepts 

 which can be used in dealing with actual problems.'* A particular mis- 

 take, in Mr. Dennison's view, is that these economists dealt with industry 

 as a category rather than with actual industries. 



Thanks to accurate censuses of occupations and production it is now 

 possible to inquire inductively into the location of actual, particular, 

 industries. In 1929 I suggested a measure of the concentration of any 

 particular industry in any given area by comparing the proportion of all 

 occupied persons that were occupied in that industry in the given area 

 with the corresponding proportion for the country as a whole. ^ A similar 

 result is obtained by comparing the proportion of all persons occupied 

 in any particular industry found in the given area with the corre- 

 sponding proportion for industry as a whole. Thus, 54*3 per cent, of 

 all brassfounders in England and Wales were found in 1931 to be in 

 the West Midlands area distinguished in the Census of Occupations, 

 but the proportions of the occupied population in the West Midlands 

 was only 11 "5 per cent, for all industries. A measure of the concen- 

 tration of the brass-founding industry in the West Midlands can thus 

 be stated as 54*3 -i- ii"5 =4-7. In a paper yet unpublished, read 

 before Section F of the British Association last year, Mr. A. J. Wensley 

 and I worked out this measure, which we called the location factor, for all 

 the industries distinguished in the 1931 Census of Occupations in respect of 

 each of the twelve areas or regions into which that Census divides England. 



The fact that some particular industry is concentrated in some particu- 

 lar areas though important for the siting of individual businesses, is, for 

 purposes of State policy, not so significant as the fact of the general 

 diffusion everywhere or concentration anywhere of the given industry. 

 If a depressed area is to be developed by the introduction of new factories 

 it is essential for the State to know which are the industries whose units 

 can be arbitrarily shifted. Some industries such as aerated waters are 

 widely diffused wherever the population presents consumers, others such 

 as cotton are narrowly concentrated where the skilled labour is found. 

 But there is probably a middle grade of industries that need neither be 

 completely diffused nor completely concentrated, some of whose units 

 can, within limits, be sited anywhere without loss of efficiency. To dis- 

 cover which industries fall into such middle grades, Mr. Wensley and 

 I worked out a measure of localisation based on the location factor.'' 

 When an industry is evenly scattered over the whole country, the location 

 factor already explained would clearly be unity for each region. To show 

 in one figure to what degree each industry is localised we calculated the 

 coefficient of localisation based on the mean deviation from unity of the 

 industry's regional location factors. Clearly a weighted mean deviation 



* See S. R. Dennison, Theory of Industry Location. The Manchester School 

 Vol. viii., No. 1. 



' Florence, The Statistical Method in Economics, pp. 327-8. 



* For other methods of measuring the degree of localisation of an industry- 

 see Day: 'Distribution of Industrial Occupations in England 1841-1861,' 

 Transactions of The Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 1927 ; Hoover, 

 ' Measurement of Industrial Localization,' Review of Economic Statistics, Nov. 1936. 



