Illuminating Economic Development in Indigenous Communities

Donna Feir, Rob Gillezeau and Maggie Jones

No 1704, Department Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria

Abstract: There are over 1,000 First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada. However, the most comprehensive public data source on economic activity, the Community Well-Being (CWB) database, only includes consistent data for 357 of these communities every five years between 1991 and 2011. We propose an alternative measure of economic well-being that is available annually since 1992 for all First Nations, Inuit, and non-Indigenous communities in Canada: nighttime light density from satellites. Nighttime light data have been used by development economists to measure economic activity elsewhere and have been shown to be a flexible alternative to traditional measures of economic activity. We find that nighttime light density is a useful proxy for per capita income in the Canadian context and provide evidence of sample selection issues with the pre-existing indicators of well-being in First Nations and Inuit communities. We suggest that using nighttime light density overcomes the biased selection of communities into the CWB samples and thus may present a more complete picture of economic activity in Canada.

Keywords: Light density; nighttime light density; Indigenous peoples; Economic development; Community Well-Being Index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I15 J15 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2017-10-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-hap
Note: ISSN 1914-2838
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.uvic.ca/socialsciences/economics/_assets/docs/discussion/DDP1704.pdf (application/pdf)

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:vic:vicddp:1704

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria PO Box 1700, STN CSC, Victoria, BC, Canada, V8W 2Y2. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kali Moon ().