MEASURING ECONOMIC GROWTH FROM OUTER SPACE

By J. Henderson, Adam Storeygard, David N. Weil. The American Economic Review, 2012

2,495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.”

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a317e73405504a7bf20536171b6059e15d07d4f

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Citations in the corpus

Aid and Growth at the Regional Level (2015, positive): “Such data have been introduced to the literature in Elvidge et al. (1997) and Sutton and Costanza (2002), and are frequently used in the recent economics literature (probably most prominently in Henderson et al., 2012).”
Stacking up the ladder: A panel data analysis of Tanzanian household energy choices (2017, neutral): “The resolution of the nighttime lights data is 30 arc seconds, which equates to roughly 1 km squared (Henderson et al., 2012).”
Roads, Railways and Decentralization of Chinese Cities (IGC Working Paper) (2012, neutral): “Third, migration restrictions across prefectures mean that a large share of rural migrants to central cities have come from surrounding hinterlands (Chan, 2001 and 2005 and Au and Henderson, 2006).”
The Mission: Human Capital Transmission, Economic Persistence, and Culture in South America* (2018, methodology): “A rst way to illustrate the impact of the Jesuit Missions on income is through the usage of nighttime satellite data (Henderson et al. 2012).54 From outer space, the missionary area is depicted in Figure 7, along with municipal level boundaries.”