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26-09-2024 | Original Paper

The rise and fall of urban concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini across two centuries

Authors: Elisa Maria Tirindelli, Ronan C. Lyons

Published in: The Annals of Regional Science | Issue 4/2024

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Abstract

City size and growth are the subject of a substantial literature in economic geography and urban economics, but consensus remains elusive on the extent to which key regularities such as Zipf’s Law or Gibrat’s Law holds across space and time. We contribute to this literature by examining city size, rank and growth in Britain 1801–2011, the first country in the world to urbanize. Across Zipf, Gibrat and Gini analyses, we find that urban concentration in Britain peaked in the mid-nineteenth century before falling 1861–1911 and again 1951–1991. The evolving relationship between city size, rank and growth in Britain since 1801 strongly suggests that drivers mentioned in the literature, such as random growth, increasing returns to scale and the importance of location fundamentals, are not constant over time. There is some evidence of increasing returns to scale 1801–1861, then offset by factors favouring smaller cities, possibly related to new transport technologies. Further, we show that conclusions about both Zipf’s and Gibrat’s Law would change if weaker city definitions, sample cutoffs and regression methods were used, a likely factor in understanding the often contradictory results in the literature on city dynamics.

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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
For a review of the literature that started with Gibrat’s work, see Sutton (1997).
 
2
Relatively few other countries have fixed geographical boundaries over the same time period. The United Kingdom included the full island of Ireland from 1801 to 1921 and Northern Ireland since. We focus here, however, on Britain, which has been in the same political unit since 1707.
 
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Metadata
Title
The rise and fall of urban concentration in Britain: Zipf, Gibrat and Gini across two centuries
Authors
Elisa Maria Tirindelli
Ronan C. Lyons
Publication date
26-09-2024
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in
The Annals of Regional Science / Issue 4/2024
Print ISSN: 0570-1864
Electronic ISSN: 1432-0592
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-024-01306-w