Illuminating Indigenous Economic Development

There are over 1,000 First Nations and Inuit communities in Canada. Only 357 of these communities are consistently included in the most comprehensive public data source on economic activity, the Community Well-Being (CWB) Database. We propose using nighttime light density measured by satellites as an alternative indicator of well-being. We show that nighttime light density is an effective proxy for per capita income in the Canadian context and provide evidence that existing publicly available databases on well-being consist of heavily selected samples that systematically exclude many of the least developed communities. We show that sample selection into the publicly available data can lead to incorrect conclusions based on three applications: (i) the comparison of well-being across community types over time; (ii) an analysis of the historical and geographic determinants of economic activity in Indigenous communities; and (iii) a study of the effects of mining intensity close to Indigenous communities. Based on these applications, we suggest that using nighttime light density overcomes the biased selection of communities into the publicly available samples and, thus, may present a more complete picture of economic activity in Canada for Indigenous peoples. JEL Classification: I15, J15,J24