Abstract：There is widespread evidence that population and other socio-economic activities at different scales are distributed according to power law and that such scaling distributions are associated with systems that have matured or grown to a steady state where their growth rates do not depend upon scale.In this paper,we use the power law to analyze the regional domain distributions in China,the distributions of regional GDP per capita and the regional population in China.It was found that the Internet in China is still at its high speed, and the regional domain distributions reflect the distributions of regional GDP per capita,not the regional population.The correlations that we found between regional domain distributions and population was low,although that between the regional domain distributions and regional GDP per capita was much higher with an about 60 percent,confirming our general intuition that the economic development of region is all the more important in explaining the Internet development.We anticipate that in time,as the Chinese information society matures,the regional domain will come to reflect the population size of regions much more than it does at present.Moreover,as the overall rank-size patterns of the regional domain distributions and regional GDP per person are quite similar,it is perhaps reasonable to conclude that the distribution of domains broadly reflects existing economic activity patterns,albeit differences in the distribution pattern of population.The power law relations that we have examined all display the tendency for the number of small events——regional domain distributions,regional populations,and regional GDP per capita——to be less than what power law predicts, this can easily be explained by the smaller domains having not yet reached maturity.Finally,the paper gives the developing speed value and the years to reach the mature and steady states of the Internet in China.
卢鹤立, 刘桂芳. 中国互联网与区域经济[J]. 人文地理, 2005, 20(5): 95-98.
LU He-li, LIU Gui-fang. INTERNET AND REGIONAL ECONOMY IN CHINA. HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2005, 20(5): 95-98.
