One country, two “urban” systems: focusing on bimodality in China’s city-size distribution

Xin Li () and Kyung-Min Nam ()
Additional contact information
Xin Li: City University of Hong Kong
Kyung-Min Nam: The University of Hong Kong

The Annals of Regional Science, 2017, vol. 59, issue 2, No 7, 427-452

Abstract: Abstract In this study, we demonstrate the existence of bimodality in China’s city-size distribution and develop an urban-growth forecast model that incorporates this bimodality. Main data for our analysis are $$0.{25}^{\circ }\times 0.{25}^{\circ }$$ 0 . 25 ∘ × 0 . 25 ∘ population density grids for the past 32 years, created from China’s official census data and county-level statistics. Our results show that the mixture of two Gaussian distributions outperforms unimodal distributions in explaining China’s historic urban-growth patterns, suggesting that the conventional unitary urban-hierarchy assumption lacks ground in China’s context. We also find that the higher-density mixture component increasingly dominates the entire distribution, and this gradual transition toward a unimodal city-size distribution is partly related to increased domestic population mobility.

JEL-codes: C10 C53 O18 R12 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00168-017-0838-1 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:anresc:v:59:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s00168-017-0838-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.com/journal/168

DOI: 10.1007/s00168-017-0838-1

Access Statistics for this article

The Annals of Regional Science is currently edited by Martin Andersson, E. Kim and Janet E. Kohlhase

More articles in The Annals of Regional Science from Springer, Western Regional Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().