IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v528y2019ics0378437119306703.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Universal City-size distributions through rank ordering

Author

Listed:
  • Ghosh, Abhik
  • Basu, Banasri

Abstract

We consider a two-parameter discrete generalized beta (DGB) distribution and propose its universal applications to study the size-distribution of the urban agglomerations across various countries in the world, where the urban agglomerations include the small and mid-sized cities along with the heavily populated cities. Our proposition is validated by an exhaustive study with the 3 decades’ census data for India and China and census data of USA for a time window of 8 years. Moreover, we have studied the city size distributions for many different countries, like Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Australia, Uganda etc., from all the continents around the world according to the availability of the data. The detailed analyses exhibit a unique global pattern for the city size distributions, from low to high size, across the world with various geographic and economic conditions. Further analyses based on the entropy of the distribution provide insights on the underlying randomness and spreads of the city sizes within a country. The DGB distribution, a typical rank order (RO) distribution, through its two parameters, not only fits the data on wider range of city sizes better than the well-known power law for all the countries considered, it also helps us to characterize, discriminate and study their evolution over time.

Suggested Citation

  • Ghosh, Abhik & Basu, Banasri, 2019. "Universal City-size distributions through rank ordering," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 528(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:528:y:2019:i:c:s0378437119306703
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.121094
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437119306703
    Download Restriction: 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
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2019.121094?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Li, Fangyi & Li, Fei & Cai, Bofeng & Lyu, Chen & Xie, Wu, 2024. "Role of Chinese cities in abating aviation carbon emissions based on gridded population data and power law model," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 288(C).
    2. Grachev, Gennady A., 2022. "Size distribution of states, counties, and cities in the USA: New inequality form information," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 592(C).
    3. Ghosh, Abhik & Mallick, Olivia & Chattopadhay, Souvik & Basu, Banasri, 2022. "Strata-based quantification of distributional uncertainty in socio-economic indicators: A comparative study of Indian states," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    4. Tomaschitz, Roman, 2020. "Multiply broken power-law densities as survival functions: An alternative to Pareto and lognormal fits," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 541(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:528:y:2019:i:c:s0378437119306703. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.