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With the influence of public health expenditure being positive, the ambiguous effect of the aggregate expenditure suggests that the weight of public and private health sectors matters, the second having a lower impact on longevity. This might explain the poor evolution of the life expectancy in countries with a high amount of private resources devoted to health. In such cases, an extension of public services could give rise to a better outcome from the overall health investment.

In this paper, an analysis is made of the evolution of Spanish urban structure during the period 1900-99. It is postulated that the size distribution of the cities follows a Pareto distribution, which is estimated on a yearly basis. At the same time, the hypothesis is adopted that the intradistribution dynamics can be modelled by means of a Markov chain. In this way, are deduced the so-called transition matrix and its associated vector or ergodic probabilities. This methodology allows two main results to be obtained. First, this evolution has not been homogeneous ; there has been a divergent pattern of growth during the period 1900-70; and a convergent pattern for the period 1970-99. Secondly, the intradistribution movements in the Spanish urban hierarchy have been very significant during the course of the 20th century. In addition, the existence of spatial correlation has also been detected for those cities that have either entered or exited from the sample of the 100 largest cities during the course of the century.