Primate cities have considerably larger populations than other cities in a country. The degree of primacy (DoP) can be measured through an adaptation of Zipf’s Rule. Separately, the populations of all cities contribute to urbanization, an index of which is the ratio of the population in the ten largest cities to the whole population (RTEN). This study aims to identify the factors (e.g. total population, land area) that are associated with high DoPs. It then seeks to link the economic performances of countries (such as GDP per capita) to their RTENs. The countries selected had either land areas or total populations or GDP values ranging from one half to twice the values for Sri Lanka, where the study was conducted; hence the focus was on relatively small countries, on which there is less emphasis in the literature. The DoP was found to exhibit nonlinear relationships with population and land area, displaying a maximum and minimum respectively. It was also significantly higher for countries with longer coastlines per square root of area. The RTEN exhibited another nonlinear relationship with GDP, with a maximum displayed, as suggested elsewhere in the literature.
Weerasinghe et al. (Wed,) studied this question.