城市规模分布的齐普夫法则评述

在区域经济学关于城市系统中城市规模分布问题研究的文献中,排序—规模原则占据相当的数量,而学者们所津津乐道的则是所谓的城市规模分布的齐普夫法则。分析表明,齐普夫法则只是描述城市规模分布的一个简单的统计关系,一个可供直接的经验检验的假说命题。迄今为止的有关经验研究,只是部分地支持了齐普夫法则。齐普夫法则及其经验研究的最大弱点,在于缺乏一个经济理论基础。

A Note on the City Size Distribution and the Zipf's Law

Regarding the studies on the city size distribution in a city system or city cluster, regional economics has excessively concentrated on the rank-size principle in which the so-called Zipf’s law is celebrated. The present paper purports to show that the Zipf’s law is just a rather simple statistic relation that describes the city size distribution, and that it proposes an empirically-testable hypothesis. The empirical studies have yielded only partial support for the Zipf’s law. The fundamental weakness of the existing literature in this field appears to be the lack of a solid foundation of economic theory.