| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w15199 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 15199 |
| Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space | |
| J. Vernon Henderson; Adam Storeygard; David N. Weil | |
| 发表日期 | 2009-07-30 |
| 出版年 | 2009 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated with measurement error in national income accounts. For countries with good national income accounts data, information on growth of lights is of marginal value in estimating the true growth rate of income, while for countries with the worst national income accounts, the optimal estimate of true income growth is a composite with roughly equal weights. Among poor-data countries, our new estimate of average annual growth differs by as much as 3 percentage points from official data. Lights data also allow for measurement of income growth in sub- and supranational regions. As an application, we examine growth in Sub Saharan African regions over the last 17 years. We find that real incomes in non-coastal areas have grown faster by 1/3 of an annual percentage point than coastal areas; non-malarial areas have grown faster than malarial ones by 1/3 to 2/3 annual percent points; and primate city regions have grown no faster than hinterland areas. Such applications point toward a research program in which "empirical growth" need no longer be synonymous with "national income accounts." |
| 主题 | Macroeconomics ; Development and Growth ; Growth and Productivity ; Environmental and Resource Economics ; Agriculture ; Regional and Urban Economics ; Regional Economics |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w15199 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/572875 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | J. Vernon Henderson,Adam Storeygard,David N. Weil. Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space. 2009. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w15199.pdf（942KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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