The concentration of cities claims about Mongolia

From Lyman Stone:

…no matter the adjustment, the US is always one of the lowest-concentration countries, along with China, India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan. We have a very diversified metropolitan ecology, as do those countries.

Third, I’ve highlighted Nordic (purple) and Anglo (orange) countries. Notice that all of the Nordics are much more concentrated than the United States, as are all of the Anglo countries! That one was surprising to me, as I expected large countries like Australia and Canada to be much more comparable to the US. As it is, in terms of population concentration, Poland is more American than Canada.

…my most concentrated countries are indeed Mongolia and Peru. Not kidding here. Both results surprised me given that both countries are fairly large and have big rural populations and, in Peru’s case, my impression was that there were a good number of meaningfully sized cities. But it turns out that, in Peru, Lima metro area alone is almost 30% of the population, and then the other cities are pretty small by comparison; and Lima is, of course, also the capital. In Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar metro area is over half of the nation’s population!

So. If you want to know what country is the most city-state-ish, I would have to answer… it’s Mongolia.

Here is the full essay, noting that Singapore is normalized as a polar option at 100% and thus cannot win the competition.  Also scroll down to the interesting graph on “State and Local Taxes Collected as a Share of GDP”: I am surprised to see Sweden come in at number one.  For all the talk of American federalism, we are just at the OECD average and in fact slightly behind Iceland in these rankings.

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