City Size Distributions For India and China

TL;DR

This study analyzes urban size distributions in India and China, estimating Zipf's law exponents and fitting Pareto and Tsallis distributions to census data from 1981-2001 for India and 1990-2000 for China.

Contribution

It provides new estimates of the scaling exponents for urban agglomerations in India and China using multiple statistical methods and goodness-of-fit tests.

Findings

India's exponent range: 1.88-2.06

China's exponent range: 1.82-2.29

Goodness-of-fit tests confirm distribution suitability

Abstract

This paper studies the size distributions of urban agglomerations for India and China. We have estimated the scaling exponent for the Zipf's law with the Indian census data for the years of 1981-2001 and the Chinese census data for 1990 and 2000. Along with the biased linear fit estimate, the maximum likelihood estimate for the Pareto and Tsallis q-exponential distribution has been computed. For India, the scaling exponent is in the range of [1.88, 2.06] and for China, it is in the interval [1.82, 2.29]. The goodness-of-fit tests of the estimated distributions are performed using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic.