| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥700,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
Through the 1980's Japan was pointed to as having excessively many very small stores. Its number of retail stores peaked in 1982 at 1.72 million, and since then declined slightly. This research investigates the factors which influence the number of stores. The main results are, first, the decline in number of retail stores is primarily due to the diffusion of car ownership and expansion in average size of dwelling. These factors, by lowering households' costs of shopping for and storing goods, lowered the number of stores needed to assure efficiency in the sense of minimum social cost of distribution. Consequently, the decline in number of stores since the mid-1980's can be understood as an efficient adjustment process.
The transmission of information at each stage of distribution channel faces various restrictions. As various agents try to enter the channel to capitalize acquired information into the profit, the distribution channel results in being long. In this research, using the panel data of five consumer goods wholesale industries in Japan for 30 years, we investigate the determination of the number of wholesale steps. The main result is that the length of a wholesale distribution channel is determined by the weight of consumption-area wholesale dealers (CWD) and the progress of keiretsu affiliated relations.
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