One of the motivations for the use of such partitionings is their ‘objectivity’. It is also asserted that there are advantages for analysis purposes over the irregular spatial polygons defined by political jurisdictions.

• There is no doubt that there are notational simplifications; one can index a cell of an array in the same fashion as in matrix algebra.
• The major advantage however is pedagogical, and results from the fact that in such a scheme every country in the world has exactly the same number of neighbors. The analytical results can be extended to the more realistic variablenumber-of-neighbors case but the insight is more easily gained in the cellular case.