Nighttime lights as a proxy for human development at the local level.

Anna Bruederle,Roland Hodler,Jacint Balaguer

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202231

Abstract

Nighttime lights, calculated from weather satellite recordings, are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity or economic development in subnational regions of developing countries where disaggregated data from statistical offices are not available. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture in these countries is limited. We use geo-referenced Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 29 African countries to construct indicators of household wealth, education and health for DHS cluster locations as well as for grid cells of roughly 50 × 50 km. We show that nighttime lights are positively associated with these location-specific indicators of human development, and that the variation in nighttime lights can explain a substantial share in the variation in these indicators. We conclude that nighttime lights are a good proxy for human development at the local level.

Highlights

Economic and social data for subnational administrative regions, such as provinces, districts or municipalities, are unavailable for most developing countries, and of poor quality if they exist
In the absence of subnational data, social scientists have recently resorted to an alternative measure that does not depend on data collection on the ground: nighttime lights calculated from weather satellite recordings and made available by the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as an annual time series
We study the association between nighttime lights and local human development at the level of both small circular zones and PRIO-GRID cells for two reasons

Summary

Introduction

Economic and social data for subnational administrative regions, such as provinces, districts or municipalities, are unavailable for most developing countries, and of poor quality if they exist. In the absence of (reliable) subnational data, social scientists have recently resorted to an alternative measure that does not depend on data collection on the ground: nighttime lights calculated from weather satellite recordings and made available by the U.S National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as an annual time series. Key benefits of these data are the global coverage and the high spatial resolution with pixels corresponding to less than one square kilometer, which allows researchers to aggregate these data at the level of the subnational units they want to study. Nighttime lights are measured with consistent quality across countries with very different institutional capacities, and are not susceptible to politically motivated manipulation

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion