IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/phsmap/v442y2016icp193-196.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The power law distribution for lower tail cities in India

Author

Listed:
  • Devadoss, Stephen
  • Luckstead, Jeff
  • Danforth, Diana
  • Akhundjanov, Sherzod

Abstract

The city size distribution for lower tail cities has received scant attention because a small portion of the population lives in rural villages, particularly in developed countries, and data are not readily available for small cities. However, in developing countries much of the population inhabits rural areas. The purpose of this study is to test whether power law holds for small cities in India by using the most recent and comprehensive Indian census data for the year 2011. Our results show that lower tail cities for India do exhibit a power law.

Suggested Citation

  • Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff & Danforth, Diana & Akhundjanov, Sherzod, 2016. "The power law distribution for lower tail cities in India," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 442(C), pages 193-196.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:442:y:2016:i:c:p:193-196
    DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.09.016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115007438
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.physa.2015.09.016?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Hernán D. Rozenfeld & Diego Rybski & Xavier Gabaix & Hernán A. Makse, 2011. "The Area and Population of Cities: New Insights from a Different Perspective on Cities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(5), pages 2205-2225, August.
    2. William J. Reed, 2002. "On the Rank‐Size Distribution for Human Settlements," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 1-17, February.
    3. Anderson, Gordon & Ge, Ying, 2005. "The size distribution of Chinese cities," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 756-776, November.
    4. Gangopadhyay, Kausik & Basu, B., 2009. "City size distributions for India and China," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 388(13), pages 2682-2688.
    5. Reed, William J., 2001. "The Pareto, Zipf and other power laws," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 74(1), pages 15-19, December.
    6. Ioannides, Yannis M. & Overman, Henry G., 2003. "Zipf's law for cities: an empirical examination," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 127-137, March.
    7. Stanley, Michael H. R. & Buldyrev, Sergey V. & Havlin, Shlomo & Mantegna, Rosario N. & Salinger, Michael A. & Eugene Stanley, H., 1995. "Zipf plots and the size distribution of firms," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 453-457, October.
    8. Xavier Gabaix, 1999. "Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(3), pages 739-767.
    9. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "A comparison of city size distributions for China and India from 1950 to 2010," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 290-295.
    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. Safari, Muhammad Aslam Mohd & Masseran, Nurulkamal & Ibrahim, Kamarulzaman & AL-Dhurafi, Nasr Ahmed, 2020. "The power-law distribution for the income of poor households," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 557(C).
    2. Akhundjanov, Sherzod B. & Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2017. "Size distribution of national CO2 emissions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 182-193.
    3. Bharathi, Naveen & Malghan, Deepak & Mishra, Sumit & Rahman, Andaleeb, 2021. "Fractal urbanism: City size and residential segregation in India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    4. Asif, Muhammad & Hussain, Zawar & Asghar, Zahid & Hussain, Muhammad Irfan & Raftab, Mariya & Shah, Said Farooq & Khan, Akbar Ali, 2021. "A statistical evidence of power law distribution in the upper tail of world billionaires’ data 2010–20," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 581(C).
    5. Mengdi Xia & Zhangwei Lu & Lihua Xu & Yijun Shi & Qiwei Ma & Yaqi Wu & Boyuan Sheng, 2022. "Impact of Regional Differences in Risk Attitude on the Power Law at the Urban Scale," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-16, October.
    6. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2017. "Pareto tails and lognormal body of US cities size distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 465(C), pages 573-578.
    7. Safari, Muhammad Aslam Mohd & Masseran, Nurulkamal & Ibrahim, Kamarulzaman, 2018. "Optimal threshold for Pareto tail modelling in the presence of outliers," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 509(C), pages 169-180.
    8. Gualandi, Stefano & Toscani, Giuseppe, 2019. "Size distribution of cities: A kinetic explanation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 524(C), pages 221-234.
    9. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen & Danforth, Diana, 2017. "The size distributions of all Indian cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 474(C), pages 237-249.
    10. Safari, Muhammad Aslam Mohd & Masseran, Nurulkamal & Ibrahim, Kamarulzaman & Hussain, Saiful Izzuan, 2021. "Measuring income inequality: A robust semi-parametric approach," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 562(C).
    11. Safari, Muhammad Aslam Mohd & Masseran, Nurulkamal & Ibrahim, Kamarulzaman & Hussain, Saiful Izzuan, 2019. "A robust and efficient estimator for the tail index of inverse Pareto distribution," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 517(C), pages 431-439.
    12. Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2016. "Size distribution of U.S. lower tail cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 444(C), pages 158-162.

    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. Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2016. "Size distribution of U.S. lower tail cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 444(C), pages 158-162.
    2. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando & González-Val, Rafael, 2013. "A new framework for the US city size distribution: Empirical evidence and theory," MPRA Paper 52190, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Akhundjanov, Sherzod B. & Devadoss, Stephen & Luckstead, Jeff, 2017. "Size distribution of national CO2 emissions," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(C), pages 182-193.
    4. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen & Danforth, Diana, 2017. "The size distributions of all Indian cities," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 474(C), pages 237-249.
    5. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "Do the world’s largest cities follow Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws?," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 125(2), pages 182-186.
    6. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "A nonparametric analysis of the growth process of Indian cities," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(3), pages 516-519.
    7. Ramos, Arturo & Sanz-Gracia, Fernando, 2015. "US city size distribution revisited: Theory and empirical evidence," MPRA Paper 64051, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. 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.
    9. Sen, Hu & Chunxia, Yang & Xueshuai, Zhu & Zhilai, Zheng & Ya, Cao, 2015. "Distributions of region size and GDP and their relation," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 430(C), pages 46-56.
    10. Miguel Puente-Ajovín & Arturo Ramos, 2015. "On the parametric description of the French, German, Italian and Spanish city size distributions," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 54(2), pages 489-509, March.
    11. Chen, Yanguang, 2012. "The rank-size scaling law and entropy-maximizing principle," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(3), pages 767-778.
    12. Rafael González-Val & Arturo Ramos & Fernando Sanz-Gracia & María Vera-Cabello, 2015. "Size distributions for all cities: Which one is best?," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 94(1), pages 177-196, March.
    13. Luckstead, Jeff & Devadoss, Stephen, 2014. "A comparison of city size distributions for China and India from 1950 to 2010," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 124(2), pages 290-295.
    14. Rafael González-Val, 2019. "US city-size distribution and space," Spatial Economic Analysis, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 14(3), pages 283-300, July.
    15. Anderson, Gordon & Ge, Ying, 2005. "The size distribution of Chinese cities," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 35(6), pages 756-776, November.
    16. Ge Hong & Shouhong Xie & Hanbing Li, 2022. "Spatial and Temporal Evolution Characteristics of China’s City Size Distribution Based on New Criteria," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(24), pages 1-20, December.
    17. Giesen, Kristian & Suedekum, Jens, 2014. "City age and city size," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C), pages 193-208.
    18. González-Val, Rafael & Lanaspa, Luis & Sanz, Fernando, 2008. "New Evidence on Gibrat’s Law for Cities," MPRA Paper 10411, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Xavier Gabaix, 2009. "Power Laws in Economics and Finance," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 255-294, May.
    20. Rafael González-Val & Luis Lanaspa & Fernando Sanz-Gracia, 2014. "New Evidence on Gibrat’s Law for Cities," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(1), pages 93-115, January.

    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:eee:phsmap:v:442:y:2016:i:c:p:193-196. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/physica-a-statistical-mechpplications/ .

    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.