Interesting summary of recent research – When economists look to the sky
“Economists are
increasingly turning to data from satellite images to estimate the level of
economic activity in regions where economic data is erratic or unavailable”
Related:
An interesting new paper:
China's GDP Growth May be Understated by
Hunter Clark, Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin
NBER Working Paper No. 23323 [April 2017]
Abstract:
Concerns about the
quality of China’s official GDP statistics have been a perennial question in
understanding its economic dynamics. We use data on satellite-recorded
nighttime lights as an independent benchmark for comparing various published
indicators of the state of the Chinese economy. Using the methodology of
Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2016a and b), we exploit nighttime lights to
compute the optimal weights for various Chinese economic indicators in a best
unbiased predictor of Chinese growth rates. Our computations of Chinese growth
based on optimal weightings of various combinations of economic indicators
provide evidence against the hypothesis that the Chinese economy contracted
precipitously in late 2015, and are consistent with the rate of Chinese growth
being higher than is reported in the official statistics.