Night-time pic reveals growing economies

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327215.200-nighttime-photos-shed-light-on-growing-economies.html

by JohnIdol • 17 years ago

24 8 17 years ago

shrikant• 17 years ago

The lights from China were not too bright or widespread as compared to those in India. IIRC, China's GDP is about thrice that of India's.

It wasn't clear (to me; correct me if I'm wrong) from the article whether this looks at the spread of lighting across the country. Seems to reflect that fairly accurately on a continent-level, though.

rfreytag2• 17 years ago

You can track trade by watching the density of radio traffic from the shipping lanes. This is in some ways a better indicator than the Baltic Dry Index.

I was trying to do what these guys did 10 years ago - but the night images data was expensive and came off a defense meteorological satellite. Found a guy at NOAA who had done the work before me and was distributing it as a lights at night study. He thought this technique of estimating GDP had issues because different regions have rules and special conditions that cause a broad difference in light levels (e.g. Denmark has particularly strict light pollutions regulations) that do not always compose at the national level.

I'll be interested in these guys results to see how they addressed the problems.

omouse2• 17 years ago

I'd assume that developing nations do not have laws dealing with light pollution or anything of that sort just yet.

rfreytag2• 17 years ago

Developing nations have no shortage of quirks. For example, they can impose tariffs on the import of the equipment needed for domestic lighting while still having a lot of GDP generated by oil. That does funny things to the analysis.

Then there was the problem of how you uncover the sub-national GDP to ground-truth your data showing sub-national variations in light levels.

mhb• 17 years ago

Paper:

http://www.econ.brown.edu/students/adam_storeygard/HSWLights...

whughes• 17 years ago

The classic, absolutely terrifying example from the Korean peninsula:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....

I have never seen an image which is so effective at showing the disparity between countries.

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

I was fascinated to see the bright streak of light tracking the Nile.

omouse2• 17 years ago

To paraphrase, The lights are turning on all over the world. :D

Night-time pic reveals growing economies

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