China is faced with the big challenge of maintaining a remarkable economic growth in an environmental friendly manner; that is why forecasting the turning point is of necessity. Traditional econometric approaches do not consider the spatial dependence that inevitably exists in the economic...

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...