Open AccessPosted Content
Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
Reads0
Chats0
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
Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to predict poverty
Neal Jean,Marshall Burke,Marshall Burke,Michael Xie,W. Matthew Davis,David B. Lobell,Stefano Ermon +6 more
TL;DR: This work shows how a convolutional neural network can be trained to identify image features that can explain up to 75% of the variation in local-level economic outcomes, and could transform efforts to track and target poverty in developing countries.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mapping the world’s free-flowing rivers
Günther Grill,Bernhard Lehner,Michele Thieme,B. Geenen,David Tickner,F. Antonelli,S. Babu,Pasquale Borrelli,L. Cheng,H. Crochetiere,H. Ehalt Macedo,R. Filgueiras,M. Goichot,Jonathan V. Higgins,Zeb S. Hogan,B. Lip,Michael E. McClain,J. Meng,Mark Mulligan,Christer Nilsson,Christer Nilsson,Julian D. Olden,Jeffrey J. Opperman,Paulo Petry,Paulo Petry,C. Reidy Liermann,Leonardo Sáenz,Leonardo Sáenz,S. Salinas-Rodriguez,P. Schelle,Rafael Schmitt,J. Snider,Florence Tan,Klement Tockner,Klement Tockner,Paula Hanna Valdujo,A. van Soesbergen,Christiane Zarfl +37 more
TL;DR: A comprehensive assessment of the world’s rivers and their connectivity shows that only 37 per cent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometres remain free-flowing over their entire length.
Journal ArticleDOI
Machine Learning: An Applied Econometric Approach
Sendhil Mullainathan,Jann Spiess +1 more
TL;DR: This work presents a way of thinking about machine learning that gives it its own place in the econometric toolbox, and aims to make them conceptually easier to use by providing a crisper understanding of how these algorithms work, where they excel, and where they can stumble.
Journal ArticleDOI
Pre-colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of deeply rooted pre-colonized ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries is investigated, where the authors combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance as proxied by satellite images of light density at night.
Journal ArticleDOI
Using luminosity data as a proxy for economic statistics
Xi Chen,William D. Nordhaus +1 more
TL;DR: It is found that luminosity has informational value for countries with low-quality statistical systems, particularly for those countries with no recent population or economic censuses.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The urbanization process and economic growth: the so-what question
TL;DR: This paper showed that there is a best degree of urban concentration, in terms of maximizing productivity growth, that best degree varies with the level of development and country size, and that over or under-concentration can be very costly in the terms of productivity growth.
Journal ArticleDOI
Under the Weather: Health, Schooling, and Economic Consequences of Early-Life Rainfall
Sharon L. Maccini,Dean Yang +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the effect of weather shocks around the time of birth on the adult health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes of Indonesian women and men born between 1953 and 1974.
Journal Article
Mapping City Lights With Nighttime Data from the DMSP Operational Linescan System
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented methods for detecting and geolocating VNIR emission sources with nighttime DMSP-OLS data and the analysis of image time series to identify spatially stable emissions from cities, towns, and industrial sites.
Journal ArticleDOI
A global index representing the stability of malaria transmission
Anthony E. Kiszewski,Andrew D. Mellinger,Andrew Spielman,Pia Malaney,Sonia Ehrlich Sachs,Jeffrey D. Sachs +5 more
TL;DR: An index representing the contribution of regionally dominant vector mosquitoes to the force of transmission was derived and it was found that these biologic characteristics of diverse vector mosquitoes interact with climate to explain much of the regional variation in the intensity of transmission.
Journal ArticleDOI
Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait from Space
TL;DR: In this article, the authors study the extent to which U.S. urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space, using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use.