Are Cities in Vietnam Distributed According to Zipf?

In this paper we test for congruence with Zipf’s Law among cities, towns, and communes in Vietnam. Zipf’s Law prescribes a particular distribution of cities when ordered by population. Much of the extant literature testing... [ view full abstract ]

In this paper we test for congruence with Zipf’s Law among cities, towns, and communes in Vietnam. Zipf’s Law prescribes a particular distribution of cities when ordered by population. Much of the extant literature testing for Zipf’s Law utilizes a methodology that has been shown to produce biased estimates in small samples. Here we employ the techniques recommended by Gabaix and Ibragimov (2007, 2011), and focus on 2009 census data of 156 urban areas in Vietnam. We find support for a distribution consistent with Zipf’s Law based on the full dataset, and two subsets: cities only, and cities and towns.