IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/11762.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Cities and Countries

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew K. Rose

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew K. Rose, 2005. "Cities and Countries," NBER Working Papers 11762, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11762
    Note: IFM ITI
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w11762.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Esteban Rossi-Hansberg & Mark L. J. Wright, 2007. "Urban Structure and Growth," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 74(2), pages 597-624.
    2. Nitsch, Volker, 2005. "Zipf zipped," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 86-100, January.
    3. Krugman, Paul, 1996. "Confronting the Mystery of Urban Hierarchy," Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, Elsevier, vol. 10(4), pages 399-418, December.
    4. Gabaix, Xavier & Ioannides, Yannis M., 2004. "The evolution of city size distributions," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: J. V. Henderson & J. F. Thisse (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 53, pages 2341-2378, Elsevier.
    5. Jan Eeckhout, 2004. "Gibrat's Law for (All) Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(5), pages 1429-1451, December.
    6. Rosen, Kenneth T. & Resnick, Mitchel, 1980. "The size distribution of cities: An examination of the Pareto law and primacy," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 165-186, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Anna Bogomolnaia & Michel Le Breton & Alexei Savvateev & Shlomo Weber, 2008. "Heterogeneity Gap in Stable Jurisdiction Structures," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 10(3), pages 455-473, June.
    2. Jesús Clemente & Rafael González-Val & Irene Olloqui, 2011. "Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws for migrations," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 47(1), pages 235-248, August.
    3. Boris A. PORTNOV, 2012. "Does The Choice Of Geographic Units Matter For The Validation Of Gibrat'S Law?," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 36, pages 79-106.
    4. Rafael González-Val & Marcos Sanso-Navarro, 2010. "Gibrat’s law for countries," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 23(4), pages 1371-1389, September.
    5. Bastos, Felipe de Sousa & Ferreira, Roberto Tatiwa & Arruda, Elano Ferreira, 2018. "Speed of Reversion of Deviations of the Purchasing Power Parity for Brazilian Cities," Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE, EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance - FGV EPGE (Brazil), vol. 72(1), February.
    6. Çağlar Özden & Christopher Parsons, 2016. "On the Economic Geography of International Migration," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(4), pages 478-495, April.
    7. Harry P. Bowen & Haris Munandar & Jean-Marie Viaene, 2006. "Evidence and Implications of Zipf’s Law for Integrated Economies," CESifo Working Paper Series 1743, CESifo.
    8. Boris Portnov & Ben Reiser & Moshe Schwartz, 2012. "Does Gibrat’s law for cities hold when location counts?," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 48(1), pages 151-178, February.
    9. Boris A. Portnov, 2011. "The Change of Support Problem (COSP) and its Implications for Urban Analysis: Some Evidence from a Study of the European Urban System," ERSA conference papers ersa10p106, European Regional Science Association.
    10. Mariusz A. Sumlinski, 2008. "International Reserves—Too Much of a Zipf’s Thing," IMF Working Papers 2008/011, International Monetary Fund.
    11. González-Val, Rafael, 2007. "The evolution of the US urban structure from a long-run perspective (1900-2000)," MPRA Paper 9732, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Harry P. Bowen & Haris Munandar & Jean-Marie Viaene, 2005. "Zipf's Law for Integrated Economies," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 05-048/2, Tinbergen Institute, revised 06 Feb 2007.
    13. Boris Portnov, 2011. "Does Zipf’s law hold for primate cities? Some evidence from a discriminant analysis of world countries," Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, Springer;Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR), vol. 31(2), pages 113-129, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sebastien TERRA, 2009. "Zipf's Law for Cities: On a New Testing Procedure," Working Papers 200920, CERDI.
    2. Valente J. Matlaba & Mark J. Holmes & Philip McCann & Jacques Poot, 2013. "A Century Of The Evolution Of The Urban System In Brazil," Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(3), pages 129-151, November.
    3. Arshad, Sidra & Hu, Shougeng & Ashraf, Badar Nadeem, 2019. "Zipf’s law, the coherence of the urban system and city size distribution: Evidence from Pakistan," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 513(C), pages 87-103.
    4. Duranton, Gilles & Puga, Diego, 2014. "The Growth of Cities," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 781-853, Elsevier.
    5. Chen, Zhihong & Fu, Shihe & Zhang, Dayong, 2010. "Searching for the parallel growth of cities," MPRA Paper 21528, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Tomoya Mori & Tony E. Smith, 2009. "A Reconsideration of the NAS Rule from an Industrial Agglomeration Perspective," KIER Working Papers 669, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    7. Ho Yeon KIM & Petra de Jong & Jan Rouwendal & Aleid Brouwer, 2012. "Shrinking population and the urban hierarchy [Housing preferences and attribute importance among Dutch older adults: a conjoint choice experiment]," ERSA conference papers ersa12p350, European Regional Science Association.
    8. Lee, Sanghoon & Li, Qiang, 2013. "Uneven landscapes and city size distributions," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 19-29.
    9. Kristian Giesen & Jens Südekum, 2011. "Zipf's law for cities in the regions and the country," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(4), pages 667-686, July.
    10. Zhihong Chen & Shihe Fu & Dayong Zhang, 2013. "Searching for the Parallel Growth of Cities in China," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(10), pages 2118-2135, August.
    11. repec:wyi:journl:002175 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Alexandra SCHAFFAR, 2012. "La Loi De Zipf Sous Le Prisme De L’Auto-Correlation Spatiale - Les Cas De La Chine Et De L’Inde," Region et Developpement, Region et Developpement, LEAD, Universite du Sud - Toulon Var, vol. 36, pages 189-204.
    13. Hasan Engin Duran & Andrzej Cieślik, 2021. "The distribution of city sizes in Turkey: A failure of Zipf’s law due to concavity," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(5), pages 1702-1719, October.
    14. Rafael González‐Val, 2019. "Historical urban growth in Europe (1300–1800)," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 98(2), pages 1115-1136, April.
    15. Soo, Kwok Tong, 2005. "Zipf's Law for cities: a cross-country investigation," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 239-263, May.
    16. Kim, Ho Yeon, 2012. "Shrinking population and the urban hierarchy," IDE Discussion Papers 360, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    17. Christian Düben & Melanie Krause, 2021. "Population, light, and the size distribution of cities," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(1), pages 189-211, January.
    18. González-Val, Rafael & Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2010. "On the best functions to describe city size distributions," MPRA Paper 21921, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Duc A. Nguyen & Steven Brakman & Harry Garretsen & Tristan Kohl, 2023. "What’s in a Name? Initial Geography and German Urban Development," CESifo Working Paper Series 10435, CESifo.
    20. Kii, Masanobu & Akimoto, Keigo & Doi, Kenji, 2012. "Random-growth urban model with geographical fitness," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(23), pages 5960-5970.
    21. Vernon Henderson & Anthony Venables, 2009. "Dynamics of city formation," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 12(2), pages 233-254, April.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F00 - International Economics - - General - - - General
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:nbr:nberwo:11762. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.