Reconsidering Zipf’s law for regional development: The case of settlements and cities in Croatia

Zipf’s law is a striking regularity in the field of urban economics that states that the sizes of cities should follow the rank-size distribution. Rank-size distribution, or the rank-size rule, is a commonly observed statistical relationship between the population size and population rank of a nations’ cities. The goal of this paper is to test Zipf’s law as applied to data for settlements and cities in Croatia using the Census of Population Survey for the year 2011. The results of the analysis have shown that Zipf’s law for settlements in Croatia holds true for the majority of the settlement sizes. However, the rank-size distribution does not hold true for extremely small and extremely large settlement sizes. When city proper and urban agglomeration of 127 Croatian cities were examined, Zipf’s law was found to hold true only for urban agglomerations. The results of the study are discussed in terms of regional development.