Access to market
Topic: Secondary Activities: Manufacturing and Industrial Location · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 5 "Secondary Activities"
Meaning
Access to market is a factor in industrial location, which means where a factory chooses to set up. NCERT calls it the most important factor. A market is more than a crowd of people. It means people who want the goods and have the money to buy them. Factories make goods to sell, so they settle where they can reach buyers easily and cheaply.
Markets come in two kinds. Europe, North America, Japan and Australia are rich markets, because people there can spend a lot. South and Southeast Asia are large markets, because so many people live there. Some goods, such as aircraft and arms, have a global market, which means their buyers are spread across the whole world.
Example
In India, many consumer goods factories cluster around big cities like Mumbai and Delhi. Huge numbers of buyers with money live there, so goods reach them quickly and at low transport cost.
Don't confuse with
- Access to raw material: here the factory is pulled towards the source of its inputs, not towards its buyers. Steel, sugar and cement plants sit near their raw materials, because those materials lose much of their weight in processing.
Related concepts
- Industrial location
- Weight-losing raw material
- Access to sources of energy
- Regional policy
- Agglomeration economies