Remotely (and wrongly) too equal: Popular night-time lights data understate spatial inequality

Xiaoxuan Zhang (), John Gibson and Xiangzheng Deng ()
Additional contact information
Xiaoxuan Zhang: University of Waikato
Xiangzheng Deng: IGSNRR, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato

Abstract: Several studies in economics and regional science use Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) night-time lights data to measure spatial inequality. These DMSP data are a poor proxy in this context because they have spatially mean-reverting errors, yielding significantly lower inequality estimates than what sub-national GDP data show. Inequality estimates from DMSP are also lower than what newer, research-focused and more accurate, satellites show from their observations of the earth at night. In this paper, county-level data from the United States and China are used to demonstrate the understatement of spatial inequality when DMSP data are used. In both settings, benchmark data on sub-national GDP are available for establishing the level and trend in spatial inequality, which is then used to assess the accuracy of the estimates coming from remote sensing sources. In the rush to use big data it is important to not lose sight of basic measurement error features of some of these data sources.

Keywords: DMSP; mean-reverting error; night lights; spatial inequality; VIIRS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2022-11-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cna, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/2213.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:wai:econwp:22/13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Waikato Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand, 3240. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Geua Boe-Gibson ().