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 Nightsat mission concept
Christopher D. Elvidge,P. Cinzano,D. R. Pettit,J. Arvesen,Paul C. Sutton,Christopher Small,Ramakrishna R. Nemani,Travis Longcore,Catherine Rich,J. Safran,John R. Weeks,S. Ebener +11 more
TL;DR: The primary findings of this study are that Nightsat should collect data from a near‐synchronous orbit in the early evening with 50 to 100 m spatial resolution and have detection limits of 2.5E−8 Watts cm−2sr−1µm−1 or better.
Journal ArticleDOI
Spectral Identification of Lighting Type and Character
TL;DR: The conclusion is that it is feasible to identify lighting type and make reasonable estimates of LER and CCT using four or more spectral bands with minimal spectral overlap spanning the 0.4 to 1.0 um region.
Journal ArticleDOI
Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere
TL;DR: Steckel et al. as discussed by the authors reconstructed health profiles from skeletal remains and found that the majority of the individuals in the sample were African-Americans, and the quality of African American life in the Southwest near the turn of the twentieth century was poor.
Journal ArticleDOI
Is Newer Better? Penn World Table Revisions and Their Impact on Growth Estimates
Simon Johnson,Simon Johnson,William D. Larson,Chris Papageorgiou,Arvind Subramanian,Arvind Subramanian +5 more
TL;DR: The authors showed that the Penn World Table (PWT) GDP estimates vary substantially across different versions of the PWT despite being derived from very similar underlying data and using almost identical methodologies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Is agriculture the engine of growth
Richard Tiffin,Xavier Irz +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors address the question raised by Gardner (2003) in his Elmhirst lecture as to the direction of causality between agricultural value added per worker and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita.