Open AccessPosted Content
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
TLDR
A statistical framework is developed that uses satellite data on lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurementerror in national income accounts.Abstract:
GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurement error in national income accounts. For countries with good national income accounts data, information on growth of lights is of marginal value in estimating the true growth rate of income, while for countries with the worst national income accounts, the optimal estimate of true income growth is a composite with roughly equal weights. Among poor-data countries, our new estimate of average annual growth differs by as much as 3 percentage points from official data. Lights data also allow for measurement of income growth in sub- and supranational regions. As an application, we examine growth in Sub Saharan African regions over the last 17 years. We find that real incomes in non-coastal areas have grown faster by 1/3 of an annual percentage point than coastal areas; non-malarial areas have grown faster than malarial ones by 1/3 to 2/3 annual percent points; and primate city regions have grown no faster than hinterland areas. Such applications point toward a research program in which "empirical growth" need no longer be synonymous with "national income accounts."read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Rethinking the “resource curse”: New evidence from nighttime light data
TL;DR: Zhang et al. as discussed by the authors examined the resource curse hypothesis from a new perspective by combining mineral location data with nighttime light data at the county scale and found that natural resource utilization has a significant positive effect on the county economy, and there is no substantial evidence of a resource curse in Guangxi's county economy.
Book ChapterDOI
Refugee Mobility: Evidence from Phone Data in Turkey.
Michel Beine,Luisito Bertinelli,Rana Cömertpay,Anastasia Litina,Jean-François Maystadt,Jean-François Maystadt,Benteng Zou +6 more
TL;DR: Considering news as an indicator of policy implemented at the provincial level, a better understanding is gained as to how policy can facilitate refugee mobility and thus enhance integration.
Eye Disease, the Fertility Decline, and the Emergence of Global Income Differences*
TL;DR: The authors empirically established the hypothesis that regional variation in the historical incidence of eye disease has influenced the current global distribution of per capita income, by reducing work life expectancy, high historical eye disease incidence has served to diminish the incentive to accumulate skills, thereby delaying the fertility transition and the take-off to sustained economic growth.
Journal ArticleDOI
What do we know about poverty in North Korea
Jesus Crespo Cuaresma,Olha Danylo,Steffen Fritz,Martin Hofer,Homi Kharas,Juan Carlos Laso Bayas +5 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided the first time estimates of absolute poverty rates in North Korean subnational regions based on the combination of innovative remote-sensed night-time light intensity data (monthly information for built areas) with estimated income distributions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evaluating Water- and Health-related Development Projects: A Cross-project and Micro-based Approach
TL;DR: In this paper, a micro-based approach is presented to evaluate the effect of water and health-related development projects which complements established evaluation methods, collecting information from 1.8 million users.
References
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a different framework for solving problems of distribution accumulation and growth first in a closed and then in an open economy, where the assumption of an unlimited labor supply is used.
Journal ArticleDOI
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Posted Content
Migration unemployment and development: a two-sector analysis.
Harris,Michael P. Todaro +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined why rural-urban labor migration persists and is even increasing in many developing nations despite the existence of positive marginal products in agriculture and significant levels of urban unemployment, and concluded that in the absence of wage flexibility an optimal policy would include both partial wage subsidies or direct government employment and measures to restrict free migration.
Book
The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a method to improve the quality of the data collected by the data collection system by using the information gathered from the data set of the user's profile.