Figure 1. Zipf’s Law for National Gross Domestic Products 1900-2008.

The Gross Domestic Products of nations appear to show a more and more a Zipfian behavior over the last one hundred years. We propose a fascinating interpretation of this evidence in terms of globalization. In fact we have said that a set is Zipfian if there exists an internal coherence among its elements. As the world has become more fully globalized, we observe that Zipf’s Law holds for an increasing number for countries. In fact in 2000 and 2008 we observe that not only the highest GDPs satisfy Zipf’s Law (red line) but also the top fifty economies and that the rank at which the deviation from a Zipf’s Law behavior starts increases in time, suggesting the idea that world economic system is getting more and more coherent, i.e. globalized. Globalization is making the world fully coherent/integrated with respect to the richness distribution among its units (i.e. countries) while this degree of integration has not yet been reached by the world’s national populations (see Fig. 3). Sources: Wikipedia: various pages on GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(PPP).