In our new publication, we examine the power-law signatures in the statistics of populations of Philippine cities and municipalities: 

• D.M.T. Ordoñez and R.C. Batac, Testing the validity of Zipf and Pareto laws: A multi-method approach, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2025.130827

Using census data from the last 20 years, we observe power-law statistical signatures for the subset of the data that contains the top 30% of cities/municipalities that hold 70% of the entire population. In particular, the population distributions show heavy tails that follow the Pareto law with exponents close to 2.5; on the other hand, the population vs. rank trends follow Zipf's law with exponents of around 0.7. 

We also observe the hierarchical scaling of Philippine cities based on population, which is a consequence of the Zipfian statistics. On the other hand, Gibrat's law is not observed, as the growth rates of the cities are found to be not independent of their population. 

The Philippines and many other similarly-situated economies are set for a huge economic and demographic transition over the next few decades. Studies such as this one aims to continuously revisit the data, to test for the robustness of these emergent statistical regularities. 

D.M.T. Ordoñez obtained his Master of Science in Applied Physics from the De La Salle University. R.C. Batac is the principal investigator of the Complex Systems Group.