Night-time lights: A global, long term look at links to socio-economic trends

Jeremy Proville, Daniel Zavala-Araiza and Gernot Wagner

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data—the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset—surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.

Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0174610

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0174610

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