Can Medium-Resolution Satellite Imagery Measure Economic Activity at Small Geographies? Evidence from Landsat in Vietnam

Ran Goldblatt, Kilian Heilmann and Yonatan Vaizman

The World Bank Economic Review, vol. 34, issue 3, 635-653

Abstract: This study explores the potential and the limits of medium-resolution satellite data as a proxy for economic activity at small geographic units. Using a commune-level dataset from Vietnam, it compares the performance of commonly used nightlight data and higher resolution Landsat imagery, which measures daytime light reflection. The analysis suggests that Landsat outperforms nighttime lights at predicting enterprise counts, employment, and expenditure in simple regression models. A parsimonious combination of the first two moments of the Landsat spectral bands can explain a reasonable share of the variation in economic activity in the cross-section. There is, however, poor prediction power of either satellite measure for changes over time.

Keywords: remote sensing; nighttime lights; Landsat (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/wber/lhz001 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:wbecrv:v:34:y::i:3:p:635-653.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The World Bank Economic Review is currently edited by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik

More articles in The World Bank Economic Review from World Bank Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().