Zipf`s law strikes again : the case of tourism

This paper examines the applicability of Zipf's law to tourism. It is established that a variation of this law holds in this case - a rank-size rule with concavity. Due to this non-linearity, it is shown that a spline regression provides an extremely convenient tool for predicting tourist arrivals in a country. The concavity is explained by appealing to random growth theory (lognormal distribution; Gibrat's law) and locational fundamentals.