TY - JOUR

T1 - Zipf, Gibrat and geography

T2 - evidence from China, India and Brazil

AU - Soo, Kwok Tong

PY - 2014

Y1 - 2014

N2 - We investigate Zipf's Law on the size distribution and Gibrat's Law on the growth of sub-national populations in China, India and Brazil. We reject Zipf's Law for India, but not for China and Brazil; a log normal distribution also fits Brazil well, but not China and India. Gibrat's Law holds for Brazil; that is, lagged population is the best predictor of current population in Brazil. In China, market potential is an important predictor of population growth, while in India both crop area and market potential are important. Our results show that there is a diversity of experiences across countries, and we speculate that this diversity maybe caused by differences in the characteristics of the three countries.

AB - We investigate Zipf's Law on the size distribution and Gibrat's Law on the growth of sub-national populations in China, India and Brazil. We reject Zipf's Law for India, but not for China and Brazil; a log normal distribution also fits Brazil well, but not China and India. Gibrat's Law holds for Brazil; that is, lagged population is the best predictor of current population in Brazil. In China, market potential is an important predictor of population growth, while in India both crop area and market potential are important. Our results show that there is a diversity of experiences across countries, and we speculate that this diversity maybe caused by differences in the characteristics of the three countries.

U2 - 10.1111/j.1435-5957.2012.00477.x

DO - 10.1111/j.1435-5957.2012.00477.x

M3 - Journal article

VL - 93

SP - 159

EP - 181

JO - Papers in Regional Science

JF - Papers in Regional Science

SN - 1056-8190

IS - 1

ER -