CAN CROATIAN URBAN HIERARCHY BE APPROXIMATED WITH THE FIBONACCI SEQUENCE? AN ANALYSIS ON HISTORICAL POPULATION DATA

Hrvoje Josic () and Berislav Zmuk ()
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Hrvoje Josic: University of Zagreb
Berislav Zmuk: University of Zagreb

Economic Thought and Practice, 2020, vol. 29, issue 1, 3-28

Abstract: Fibonacci numbers can be found in nature and have application in various fields of human activity. The Fibonacci sequence can also be used to predict population of settlements. The goal of this paper is to examine whether the hierarchy of the Croatian urban system can be approximated with the Fibonacci sequence on historical census data from 1857 to 2011. Actual values of urban rank according to settlements size were compared to the predicted values using two Fibonacci methods from the Fibonacci sequence. First method divides the population of the largest city by the golden ratio constant while the second method takes the population of each successive city and divides it by the golden ratio constant. The conducted analysis has shown that Croatian urban system conforms to the Fibonacci sequence with very good precision. Method 2 gives more precise overlaps of the actual number of inhabitants by settlements in the urban hierarchy of Croatia with the Fibonacci sequence than Method 1. If the largest city Zagreb is excluded from the analysis, the estimations are more precise with smaller mean MAPE.

Keywords: Croatia; urban system; Fibonacci sequence; rank-size rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P25 R11 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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