The international (and, increasingly, global) nature of grocery retailing is promoting the need to consider developments across numerous markets in order to understand fully any given country’s market characteristics. However, compared with the breadth of research on various aspects of UK...

The World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts that world-wide, depression will be the second largest source of burden of disease by 2020. It is currently estimated that approximately 300,000 Irish people experience depression. To date no research has been carried out on the small area incidence...

As with ill health in general, the conventional wisdom is that mental illnesses are more prevalent in urban settings. This assumption has meant that there has been a paucity of literature documenting the mental health needs of rural and remote communities. For example, the present literature on...

The aim of this paper is to establish whether there are spatial variations in acute hospital utilisation in Ireland and if so, what are the micro-level factors influencing this variation? Firstly, an alignment process is used to calibrate the acute in-patient attendance and nights spent in...

This paper analyses the effect accessibility has on General Practitioner (GP) utilisation rates at the sub-national level for Ireland. Specifically, the aim of this paper is to estimate whether there is an urban/rural differential in GP utilisation rates. We do this by simulating micro-level...

Using statistical matching techniques, economists can now create attribute rich datasets by matching across the common variables in two or more datasets. The farm level spatial microsimulation model developed in this paper uses one of many combinational optimisation techniques – simulated...

The Competition Commission’s analysis in 2007 of entry and exit conditions among small stores across more than one thousand British high streets provided a landmark piece of research on a topic in which debate and policy recommendations had moved significantly, and arguably dangerously, ahead...

Geodemographic systems currently provide classifications of small areas based primarily on their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. In this paper the authors aim to demonstrate the value of extending geodemographics by including new sets of variables. These have been selected to...