Cities and Countries
- 1 January 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Project MUSE in Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
- Vol. 38 (8), 2225-2245
- https://doi.org/10.1353/mcb.2007.0009
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
Other Versions
This publication has 4 references indexed in Scilit:
- Zipf zippedJournal of Urban Economics, 2005
- The Size of NationsForeign Affairs, 2004
- Zipf Distribution of U.S. Firm SizesScience, 2001
- Confronting the Mystery of Urban HierarchyJournal of the Japanese and International Economies, 1996