KANGAROOS, CITIES AND SPACE: A FIRST APPROACH TO THE AUSTRALIAN URBAN SYSTEM

Australia shapes a unique urban system. This paper examines the Australian urban system using data for urban centers and localities in 1996 and 2001. A summary and a basic descriptive analysis of the database are provided, followed by an examination of whether the system follows Zipf’s and Gibrat’s laws. None of them are found to hold. An Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (ESDA) as well as a confirmatory analysis are carried out by using some of the most recent developments in spatial econometrics (Heteroskedastic Consistent GM Estimation) to analyze the spatial dimension of city size and growth, finding no influence for the former but a significant one for the latter.