City size distributions for India and China

Kausik Gangopadhyay and B. Basu

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2009, vol. 388, issue 13, 2682-2688

Abstract: This paper studies the size distributions of urban agglomerations for India and China. We have estimated the scaling exponent for Zipf’s law with the Indian census data for the years of 1981–2001 and the Chinese census data for 1990 and 2000. Along with the biased linear fit estimate, the maximum likelihood estimate for the Pareto and Tsallis q-exponential distribution has been computed. For India, the scaling exponent is in the range of [1.88, 2.06] and for China, it is in the interval [1.82, 2.29]. The goodness-of-fit tests of the estimated distributions are performed using the Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic.

Keywords: City size; Statistical distribution; Scaling exponent (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437109002076
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:388:y:2009:i:13:p:2682-2688

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2009.03.019

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().