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Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
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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
Citations
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Civil Conflicts, Economic Shocks and Night-time Lights
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of economic growth shocks on the risk of civil conflict outbreak in Africa was investigated using night-time light data from satellites, and a spatial autoregressive panel model was used to examine the role of spillover effects.
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Syria in the Dark: Estimating the Economic Consequences of the Civil War through Satellite-Derived Night Time Lights
Giorgia Giovannetti,Elena Perra +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the impact of the War on Syria's economy from the perspective of outer space, bypassing the issue of data availability due to the inaccessibility of the war-ravaged territory.
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Targeting humanitarian aid using administrative data: Model design and validation
Onur Altindag,Stephen D. O'Connell,Stephen D. O'Connell,Aytug Sasmaz,Zeynep Balcioglu,Paola Cadoni,Matilda Jerneck,Aimee Kunze Foong +7 more
TL;DR: Standard metrics of prediction accuracy suggest this approach compares favorably to the commonly used “scorecard” Proxy Means Test, which requires a survey of the entire target population.
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Natural disasters and regional development – the case of earthquakes
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed the impact of earthquakes on nighttime lights at a sub-national level, i.e., on grids of different size, by using geophysical event data on earthquakes together with satellite nighttime lights.
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Inference in games without Nash equilibrium: An application to restaurants' competition in opening hours
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References
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Book
The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade
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