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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
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Density, Cities and Air Pollution: A Global View
Abstract: In this paper, we take a global view at air pollution looking at countries and cities worldwide. In doing so, we revisit the relationship between population density and air pollution, using i) a large panel of countries with data from 1960 to 2010, and ii) a unique and large sample of more than 1200 (big) cities around the world, combining pollution data with satellite data on built-up areas, population and light intensity at night at the grid-cell level for the last two decades. At the country level, we find that higher density in urban areas is associated with lower CO2 and PM2.5 emissions per capita. This result is supported at the city level; denser cities show lower emissions per capita. Our finding is robust to several controls and different estimation techniques and identification strategies. In our city level analysis, we also investigate the role of various characteristics of cities, in particular their average income, size and spatial structure (indicating within-city differences in density). We find evidence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve between economic development and pollution and that a polycentric city structure leads to lower pollution in the largest urban areas, while monocentricity seems beneficial for smaller cities.
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Persistence of cities: Evidence from China
Fan Duan,Bulent Unel +1 more
TL;DR: The authors investigated the long-run impact of early development on today's living standards in China using data from the Qing dynasty and found that cities which were more prosperous during the Qing era are richer, richer, more educated, and more open.
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.
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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.