IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wai/econwp/22-13.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Remotely (and wrongly) too equal: Popular night-time lights data understate spatial inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Xiaoxuan Zhang

    (University of Waikato)

  • John Gibson

    (University of Waikato)

  • Xiangzheng Deng

    (IGSNRR, Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Abstract

Several studies in economics and regional science use Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) night-time lights data to measure spatial inequality. These DMSP data are a poor proxy in this context because they have spatially mean-reverting errors, yielding significantly lower inequality estimates than what sub-national GDP data show. Inequality estimates from DMSP are also lower than what newer, research-focused and more accurate, satellites show from their observations of the earth at night. In this paper, county-level data from the United States and China are used to demonstrate the understatement of spatial inequality when DMSP data are used. In both settings, benchmark data on sub-national GDP are available for establishing the level and trend in spatial inequality, which is then used to assess the accuracy of the estimates coming from remote sensing sources. In the rush to use big data it is important to not lose sight of basic measurement error features of some of these data sources.

Suggested Citation

  • Xiaoxuan Zhang & John Gibson & Xiangzheng Deng, 2022. "Remotely (and wrongly) too equal: Popular night-time lights data understate spatial inequality," Working Papers in Economics 22/13, University of Waikato.
    • Handle: RePEc:wai:econwp:22/13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repec.its.waikato.ac.nz/wai/econwp/2213.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    DMSP; mean-reverting error; night lights; spatial inequality; VIIRS;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wai:econwp:22/13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Geua Boe-Gibson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dewaknz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.