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
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Fighting for a name on the ballot: constituency-level analysis of nomination violence in Zambia
Edward Goldring,Michael Wahman +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the role of horizontal conflict between local political elites and vertical conflict between national political elites, and find that horizontal conflict can be an expression of both horizontal and vertical conflicts.
Journal ArticleDOI
Can we rely on VIIRS nightlights to estimate the short-term impacts of natural hazards? Evidence from five South East Asian countries
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nightlights to model damage caused by earthquakes, floods and typhoons in five South East Asian countries (Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Singapore).
Journal ArticleDOI
Transferability of Economy Estimation Based on DMSP/OLS Night-Time Light
TL;DR: This paper built up the GDP estimation model based on the NTL data in each year with each method respectively, then applied each model to the other 12 years for the evaluation of the time series transferability, and revealed that the performances of models differ greatly across years and methods.
Posted Content
Exposure to Transit Migration, Public Attitudes and Entrepreneurship
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a unique locality-level panel from the 2010 and 2016 rounds of the Life in Transition Survey and data on the main land routes taken by migrants in 18 European countries during the refugee crisis in 2015.
Posted Content
Further Evidence on the Link between Pre-Colonial Political Centralization and Comparative Economic Development in Africa
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the link between pre-colonial statehood and contemporary regional African development, as reflected in satellite images on light density at night, and employ a variety of historical maps to capture the former.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour
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
Increasing Returns and Economic Geography
TL;DR: This paper developed a simple model that shows how a country can endogenously become differentiated into an industrialized core and an agricultural periphery, in which manufacturing firms tend to locate in the region with larger demand, but the location of demand itself depends on the distribution of manufacturing.
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.