Illuminating Indigenous Economic Development

Donna Feir, Rob Gillezeau and Maggie Jones

No 1806, Department Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Victoria

Abstract: There are over 1,000 First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada. Only 357 of these communities are consistently included in the most comprehensive public data source on economic activity, the Community Well-Being (CWB) Database. We propose using nighttime light density measured by satellites as an alternative indicator of well-being. We show that nighttime light density is an effective proxy for per capita income in the Canadian context and provide evidence that existing publicly available databases on well-being consist of heavily selected samples that systematically exclude many of the least developed communities. We show that sample selection into the publicly available data can lead to incorrect conclusions based on three applications: (i) the comparison of well-being across community types over time; (ii) an analysis of the historical and geographic determinants of economic activity in Indigenous communities; and (iii) a study of the effects of mining intensity close to Indigenous communities. Based on these applications, we suggest that using nighttime light density overcomes the biased selection of communities into the publicly available samples and, thus, may present a more complete picture of economic activity in Canada for Indigenous peoples. JEL Classification: I15, J15,J24

Keywords: light density; nighttime light density; Indigenous peoples; economic development; community well-being index (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2018-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-hap and nep-lma
Note: ISSN 1914-2838
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:vic:vicddp:1806

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