New Region Planning in France? Better Order or More Disorder?

Abstract

This paper grounds the critique of the reduction of regions in a country , not only in its geographical and social context but also in its entropic space. The various recent plans leading to the reduction of the number of regions in metropolitan France are discussed, based on the mere distribution in the number of municipalities in the plans and analyzed according to various distribution laws. Each case, except the present distribution with 22 regions, on the mainland, does not seem to fit presently used theoretical models. In addition, the number of inhabitants is examined in each plan. The same conclusion holds. Therefore, a theoretical argument based on entropy considerations is proposed, thereby pointing to whether more order or less disorder is the key question-discounting political considerations.

Statistical Analysis of the Membership Management Indicators of the Church of England UK Dioceses during the Recent (XXth Century) “Decade of Evangelism”

“…Indeed, stochastic orderings have a long history, with perhaps the most famous being those associated with the Gini coefficient. In many cases, researchers have detected the existence of power laws, for different characteristic quantities of such complex systems attributing the regularities, e.g., to self-organizations [33] or to external constraints [36], even though it is not always easy to distinguish power laws from exponential laws [37].…”

Population patterns in World’s administrative units

“…On the other hand, there are other countries, such as Spain, where political divisions are very old and have suffered only minor changes [ 59 ]. Another interesting example is the case of France, where recently there were various plans to reduce the number of regions, finally reducing it from 22 to 13 after months of debate; this is an example of a directed reorganization with the aim of reducing bureaucracy and administrative costs, but with possible negative effects according to entropy or disorder criteria [ 60 ]. Every country has its individual historical, economic, social, political and geographical conditions determining the evolution of its administrative division system; as a consequence, any model attempting to simulate some features of this complex process must be both generic and flexible.…”

An Intrinsic Entropy Model for Exchange-Traded Securities

“…During the early 1970s, entropy and information theory analysis experienced a brief surge in interest in finance and economics literature [11][12][13][14].…”