A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth

A Bright Idea for Measuring Economic Growth.

Most readers of this article are already familiar with images of “the earth at night.” Looking at such images, it is easy to see that the brightness of visible lights is strongly related to both population density and income per capita. The effect of population density shows up in the visibility of urban agglomerations, coastlines, river valleys, and the higher density of population along the p...

BIOGAS: A Bright Idea for Africa

Background: In the context of climate change, an efficient alert system to prevent the risk associated with summer heat is necessary. The authors' objective was to describe the temperature-mortality relationship in France over a 29-year period and to define and validate a combination of temperature factors enabling optimum prediction of the daily fluctuations in summer mortality. Methods: The s...

Idea Flows, Economic Growth, and Trade∗

We study a simple model of the world economy where the engine of growth is the flows of ideas. Ideas are assumed to diffuse randomly across pair of goods, where the processes used in the production of the lower cost good is adopted. We assume that producers in a country can learn from all sellers of goods to this country. We analyze how trade in goods, and impediments to it, affect this diffusi...

Online Appendix Idea Flows, Economic Growth, and Trade

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space.

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities or subnational regions. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. We develop a statistical framework that uses lights growth to augment existing income growth measures, under the assumption that measurement error in using observed light as an indicator of income is uncorrelated...