Nighttime lights and wealth in very small areas

Nachtlichter und Wohlstand in Kleinräumigen Daten

Ilari Määttä (), Thomas Ferreira () and Christian Lessmann
Additional contact information
Ilari Määttä: TU Braunschweig
Thomas Ferreira: University of Cape Town

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft, 2022, vol. 42, issue 2, No 4, 190 pages

Abstract: Abstract Nighttime lights observed from satellites are a widely accepted proxy measure for economic development. This is mainly based on cross-country evidence that finds strong correlations between lights and Gross Domestic Product. Yet, the evidence on the correlations at local levels is scarce, and it often relies on randomly sampled survey data. We contribute by enhancing the understanding of the relationship between light and development at local levels. First, we use complete (non-publicly available) census data from Namibia to evaluate the findings based on the randomly sampled Demographic and Health Surveys data. We find that the census data provides a stronger association between light and wealth at local levels. Second, we criticize the practice of aggregating light from buffers around survey cluster locations. Instead, we recommend aggregating data in grid cells, and studying the relationship in different grid sizes. In our study correlations based on grid cells remain significant from a 0.5 degree grid to the smallest 0.0083 degree grid (~1 km2) allowed by the nighttime light data. Third, we supplement the commonly used relative wealth index by using individual asset variables as proxies for the total stock of wealth. The stock variables reveal a significant association between changes in light and wealth which cannot be found using our relative wealth index. Altogether, our results show that nighttime lights provide an even stronger signal of economic development at local levels than the current survey-based results in the literature suggest.

Keywords: Nighttime Lights; Wealth; Spatial Data; Demographic and Health Surveys; R1; O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10037-021-00159-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jahrfr:v:42:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10037-021-00159-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10037

DOI: 10.1007/s10037-021-00159-6

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft is currently edited by Thomas Brenner and Georg Hirte

More articles in Review of Regional Research: Jahrbuch für Regionalwissenschaft from Springer, Gesellschaft für Regionalforschung (GfR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().