Examining the validity of Zipf's law for Philippine cities and municipalities: A multi-method approach

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ID: 287241
2025
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Abstract
Zipf's law is a statistical rule where after ordering a collection of objects by size in descending order, the second object is one-half of the largest, the third is one-third, and so on. It has been extensively studied for city size distributions of various urban systems across different territories. The current work aims to examine the validity of Zipf's law for Philippine cities and municipalities for different time periods, given the literature gap in the case of the country. The data will consist of city-level data from the Philippine Statistics Authority census for 2000, 2010, 2015, and 2020. Three approaches will be used: linear regression, Gibrat's law, hierarchical scaling law. As a complement to the first approach, power law behavior of the city sizes will also be assessed. Data truncation will be considered in the various analyses to be performed. Zipf's law can be used to assess the condition of the urban system, and when applicable, allows for the projections of city population. The linear regression and hierarchical scaling law approaches provide evidence supporting Zipf's law for the truncated dataset or the upper tail of the size distribution. On the other hand, all three approaches give evidence contrary to the law for the untruncated data. The upper tail comprises roughly the top 30% of LGUs and consists of around 70% of the entire population across several years. This range also shows three signatures of complex systems: Zipf-like behavior in the rank-size distribution, a power law in the frequency distribution, and fractality. Furthermore, the upper tail does not strictly conform to Zipf's law, but it has incrementally become more uneven over the years. This may be explained by the above-average growth rates for the largest city sizes. The smallest city sizes, in contrast, tend to have below-average rates. Based on the difference in the results of the two datasets, the statistics suggest that the power law behavior is essential for a Zipf-like characteristic to hold. Furthermore, the results from the three approaches indicate that Philippine urban system is gradually becoming more concentrated. Keywords: Zipf’s law, Gibrat’s law, hierarchical scaling law, Philippine urban system, complex systems
Reference Key
persistent_1760661000_68f18e0818328 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Ordoñez, Dylan Marcus T.
Journal Malay Journal
Year 2025
DOI
DOI not found
URL
https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_physics/21
Keywords Keywords not found

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