Bright Lights of Cities: Reassessing Siberian Curse through the Lens of Nighttime Lights

S. Keola, K. Kumo, Kenmei Tsubota and A. Ueda
Additional contact information
S. Keola: Economic Geography Studies Group, Development Studies Center, Institute of Developing Economies-JETRO
K. Kumo: Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University
A. Ueda: Global Studies Group, Inter-disciplinary Studies Center, Institute of Developing Economies-JETRO

Regional Research of Russia, 2024, vol. 14, issue 3, 458-467

Abstract: Abstract With exploitation of satellite data, this paper uncovers the changes of economic activities in Russian cities from 1989 to 2012. Compared to the findings by population, satellite data allowed us to explore possibilities to understand the spread and growth in the intensity of economic activities in space and size. This paper examines the so called “Siberian Curse” where soviet era regional development policies, urban growth, and migration restriction may be affected so as to make more population living in colder regions. After about 20 years from the collapse of USSR, Siberian curse may be broken. Our results show that though population may be still in the similar trends, growth in lit area and lit intensity are observed in warmer regions suggesting the break of Siberian Curse. However, once a few outliers are dropped, the cities listed in Hill and Gaddy’s work The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia out in the Cold have positive and statistically significant growth in lit indicators, suggesting the break of Siberian Curse may take some more decades.

Keywords: satellite data; nighttime lights; long term developments; Russian cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1134/S2079970524600318 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:rrorus:v:14:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1134_s2079970524600318

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... cience/journal/13393

DOI: 10.1134/S2079970524600318

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Research of Russia is currently edited by Vladimir M. Kotlyakov and Vladimir A. Kolosov

More articles in Regional Research of Russia from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().