Measuring growth from outer space

Aid Watch: Cool Maps: Measuring growth from outer space

For many of the world’s poorest countries, figures measuring economic growth are unreliable, and in some cases they don’t exist at all.  In an NBER working paper, Brown University professors J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil came up with an interesting proxy for GDP growth: the amount of light that can be seen from outer space.

Lights-at-night

The really stark map is this one of North and South Korea:

N-and-SKorea


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