Mapping Poverty of Latin American and Caribbean Countries from Heaven Through Night-Light Satellite Images

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly is calling National Statistics Offices worldwide to underpin a data revolution. Indeed, these organizations should extend both the scope and disaggregation of the data traditionally produced, and measure new economic, social and environmental phenomena, leaving none behind. There is a growing consensus that, in the digital era, earth observation might strengthen traditional data sources and statistics in monitoring sustainable well-being, facilitating the transformative agenda that official statisticians should implement in the forthcoming years. This research analyses how earth observation, under the form of observable nightlights, might help in mapping poverty data, thus filling in existing gaps of official statistics for a core sustainable development indicator. The empirical analyses show that there are indeed considerable advantages from the use of satellite remote sensing information, the so-called ‘views from the above’, in facing the increasing demand from policy makers and the public at large. The analysis shows that publicly and freely available information from the space might be a key source of information to derive—through an unbalanced fractional panel-data model—spatially disaggregated and continuous-time estimations of poverty gap, headcount, and Gini indices for 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries.