Illuminating Dark Economies
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
- Image by woodleywonderworks via Flickr
Measuring economic activity from outer space is a new frontier in the struggle to quantify humanity’s impact on the natural world.
Looking down from orbit hundreds or thousands of kilometers above the sunlit surface of the Earth, the signposts of civilization are clearly visible. The vast checkerboard patterns of farmland; the thin traceries of roads, railways, and airplane contrails; Egypt’s Great Pyramid and China’s Great Wall—all are easily seen with the naked eye. But passing into night, the view changes. The signs of humanity fade save for one: light from artificial sources like electric lamps, oil-refinery gas flares, and intentionally set fires.
In 1962, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth, he also clearly demonstrated that lights at night could trace human activity from space. Passing over western Australia, he reported seeing a very bright light on the ground; the citizens of Perth had coordinated to turn on as many lights as possible to signal to Glenn as he flew overhead.
Since that time, satellite imagery of nighttime lights has proved useful as a piecemeal method to measure development upon our planet. Static snapshots can reveal stark disparities, like the brightly glowing prosperity of South Korea beneath the darkness of the impoverished, totalitarian north. Gradual changes can be discerned, too, like when the intensity of Soviet-bloc countries’ nighttime lights slowly increased after the USSR’s fall. All such observations to date have been quite crude, constrained by the fact that most of the data comes from one low-resolution source, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP), an aging network of satellites formerly operated by the US Air Force but now controlled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
But new analytical techniques and observational satellites may soon open a more rigorous frontier for measuring economic activity from space. Brown University economists J. Vernon Henderson and David Weil, along with their graduate student Adam Storeygard, recently released an analysis of a decade’s worth of global night-light data from DMSP. Their research shows a link between changes in a country’s gross domestic product and the intensity of its electric lighting: On average, as a country’s GDP increases, its nighttime light emission becomes more intense. The work is particularly promising for measuring growth in the developing world, where the quality of collected economic data is notoriously poor.
“A lot of activity in these developing countries is in the untaxed, off-the-books informal sector, but very little information is gathered about it,” Henderson says. “So when [statistical agencies] estimate total economic activity, they don’t really know the size of that sector even though it may account for a majority of the employment in the country. When you get another metric to compare the numbers to, you can be shocked by how much they are off.”
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