Empirical patterns of the mexican industrial structure: Evidence of Zipf´s Law

Abstract

Recently, in the field of social sciences, a large number of empirical patterns and regularities traditionally associated with the natural sciences have been found. Particularly, in economic science, empirical evidence has been found around the existence of economic phenomena governed by a type of regularity known as Power Law. Phenomena of economic aggregation, such as the distribution of income and wealth, the growth of cities, the returns on financial assets, and stock market transaction volumes, are especially conditioned by a Power Law, called Zipf's Law. This article presents sufficient empirical evidence to affirm the validity of Zipf's Law in the case of the industrial structure in Mexico. Using the SCIAN classification, the structure of 21 industrial subsectors is analyzed. By using four methods, the power exponent is found to tend to its theoretical expected value.