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
Citations
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Nighttime lights as a proxy for human development at the local level.
Anna Bruederle,Roland Hodler +1 more
TL;DR: It is concluded that nighttime lights are a good proxy for human development at the local level and can explain a substantial share in the variation in these indicators of human development.
Journal ArticleDOI
Analysis of urban growth and estimating population density using satellite images of nighttime lights and land-use and population data.
Hasi Bagan,Yoshiki Yamagata +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban expansion in Japan from 1990 to 2006 by using gridded land-use data, population census data, and satellite images of nighttime lights was investigated.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ethnic favoritism: An axiom of politics?
Giacomo De Luca,Giacomo De Luca,Giacomo De Luca,Roland Hodler,Paul A. Raschky,Michele Valsecchi +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors study ethnic favoritism in a global sample and rely on nighttime light intensity to capture a broad range of preferential policies targeted towards the political leaders' ethnic homelands.
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Malthus living in a slum: Urban concentration, infrastructures and economic growth
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors revisited the literature on urban concentration and economic growth to shed some light on these previous results, and provided empirical evidence on the role that the urban environment plays in the relationship between urban concentration, and the main contribution of this paper is to provide empirical evidence.
Journal ArticleDOI
Do the rich have stronger willingness to pay for environmental protection? New evidence from a survey in China
TL;DR: Wang et al. as discussed by the authors investigated the effect of income on residents' willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental protection at both macro and micro perspectives based on the ordered Logit model.
References
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Posted Content
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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.