Cities and Countries

Andrew Rose

No 5235, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: If one ranks cities by population, the rank of a city is inversely related to its size, a well-documented phenomenon known as Zipf's Law. Further, the growth rate of a city's population is uncorrelated with its size, another well-known characteristic known as Gibrat's Law. In this paper, I show that both characteristics are true of countries as well as cities; the size distributions of cities and countries are similar. But theories that explain the size-distribution of cities do not obviously apply in explaining the size-distribution of countries. The similarity of city- and country-size distributions is an interesting riddle.

Keywords: Distribution; Zipf; Gibrat; Empirical; Mean; Growth; Rank; Size; Logarithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F00 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Working Paper: Cities and Countries (2005)
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