Empirical nonextensive laws for the county distribution of total personal income and gross domestic product

Ernesto P Borges

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2004, vol. 334, issue 1, 255-266

Abstract: We analyze the cumulative distribution of total personal income of USA counties, and gross domestic product of Brazilian, German and United Kingdom counties, and also of world countries. We verify that generalized exponential distributions, related to nonextensive statistical mechanics, describe almost the whole spectrum of the distributions (within acceptable errors), ranging from the low region to the middle region, and, in some cases, up to the power-law tail. The analysis over about 30 years (for USA and Brazil) shows a regular pattern of the parameters appearing in the present phenomenological approach, suggesting a possible connection between the underlying dynamics of (at least some aspects of) the economy of a country (or of the whole world) and nonextensive statistical mechanics. We also introduce two additional examples related to geographical distributions: land areas of counties and land prices, and the same kind of equations adjust the data in the whole range of the spectrum.

Keywords: Econophysics; Nonextensive statistical mechanics; Complex systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:334:y:2004:i:1:p:255-266

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2003.11.003

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