Abstract

This study aimed to track changes of some variables related to the industrial location in Saudi Economy such as: number of factories, size of employment, and capital during the period (2006-2015). The research applied the “Economic Base Theory” to describe and to analyze the distribution of manufacturing industries between different regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The study applied some indicators to measure the manufacturing sector location such as: location coefficent, regional excess supply and demand, economic base multiplier, regional weight of local trade, concentration index, linkage coefficient, coefficient of correlation. The study applied also the methodology of Euclidian distance and and the stratification analysis as additional approach to quantify the industrial location. This study applied the same methodology of (Alkhatib and AL-Dakhil, 1999) ‘research and updated the studied period. Some additional indicators are used to emphasis this methodology to give more reliability to its results. The results of the study showed that despite the noticeable expansion and diversification of industrial activities, the same results are still localizing Saudi industry in three main regions: Riyadh, Makkah Al-Mukarramah and the Eastern Region. The study also highlighted that about a third of the internal trade is contributed by the Eastern Region, approximately a fifth of which is contributed by Riyadh and another fifth by Makkah Al-Mukarramah.