A note on functional forms and the urban size distribution

Abstract

Since Singer’s work [14] to demonstrate the relationship between the rank and size of urban areas, several studies have applied the Pareto distribution to urban sizes in different countries with cross-sectional or time-series analyses. However, the subject of the Pareto distribution of urban sizes is not resolved because previous studies yielded different empirical results and because there may be other methodologies to estimate the Pareto distribution of urban sizes. The Pareto distribution of urban sizes may be expressed as