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Test of two hypotheses explaining the size of populations in a system of cities

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journal contribution
posted on 2015-08-21, 09:02 authored by Nikolay K. Vitanov, Marcel Ausloos
Two classical hypotheses are examined about the population growth in a system of cities: Hypothesis 1 pertains to Gibrat's and Zipf's theory which states that the city growth–decay process is size independent; Hypothesis 2 pertains to the so-called Yule process which states that the growth of populations in cities happens when (i) the distribution of the city population initial size obeys a log-normal function, (ii) the growth of the settlements follows a stochastic process. The basis for the test is some official data on Bulgarian cities at various times. This system was chosen because (i) Bulgaria is a country for which one does not expect biased theoretical conditions; (ii) the city populations were determined rather precisely. The present results show that: (i) the population size growth of the Bulgarian cities is size dependent, whence Hypothesis 1 is not confirmed for Bulgaria; (ii) the population size growth of Bulgarian cities can be described by a double Pareto log-normal distribution, whence Hypothesis 2 is valid for the Bulgarian city system. It is expected that this fine study brings some information and light on other usually considered to be more pertinent countries of city systems.

History

Citation

Journal of Applied Statistics, 2015

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE/School of Management

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Journal of Applied Statistics

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

issn

0266-4763

eissn

1360-0532

Acceptance date

2015-04-30

Copyright date

2015

Available date

2016-06-02

Publisher version

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02664763.2015.1047744#.Vdbnb_lK-5I

Language

en

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