On the growth of primary industry and population of China's counties

TL;DR

This study analyzes the growth patterns of primary industry and population across Chinese counties, revealing heavy-tailed distributions and size-dependent variability, with implications for understanding regional development dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of growth dynamics in Chinese counties, highlighting power-law behaviors and distribution characteristics distinct from developed countries.

Findings

Growth rates follow Student's t distribution with tail exponent < 2

Power-law relationship between standard deviation and initial size

Scaling exponent differs between primary industry and population

Abstract

The growth dynamics of complex organizations have attracted much interest of econophysicists and sociophysicists in recent years. However, most of the studies are done for developed countries. We investigate the growth dynamics of the primary industry and the population of 2079 counties in mainland China using the data from the China County Statistical Yearbooks from 2000 to 2006. We find that the annual growth rates are distributed according to Student's $t$ distribution with the tail exponent less than 2. We find power-law relationships between the sample standard deviation of the growth rates and the initial size. The scaling exponent is less than 0.5 for the primary industry and close to 0.5 for the population.