Assessment of the balance of China's urban system based on the Zipf Rule

Subject. The article discusses the development of China's urban system. Objectives. The purpose is to assess China's urban system based on empirical verification of its compliance with the Zipf rule. Methods. The study employs economic and statistical methods of research of regional economy and urban development, methods of synthesis, analysis, and generalization. Results. The empirical assessment of the applicability of the Zipf rule to the Chinese economy demonstrated that the size of Chinese cities follow the Pareto distribution, while the shape parameter (the Pareto index) obtained as a result of evaluating the regression equations, which reflects the uniformity of distribution of urban population in space, is equal to one. This indicates a high degree of balance of agglomeration processes in China, as well as the balance of the national urban systems from the point of view of the distribution of human resources in space. Conclusions. The measures implemented by the Chinese government to promote urbanization are aimed not only at administrative reform and infrastructure development, but also act as important strategies for long-term economic growth and social progress. The findings indirectly confirm the fact that the use of planned economic development tools does not have a distorting effect on the functioning of market mechanisms in practice.