Title: Cities and countries
First published: 2005
Description: "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"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Subjects: Cities and towns, Growth, Human geography, Population, Size of States, States, Size of
LC classification: HB1