Stellenbosch-Econometrics/Geospatial-Inequality

Geospatial (Remote Sensing) Inequality Estimates for South Africa ## Geospatial (Remote Sensing) Inequality Estimates for South Africa This is exploratory work and summarized in the presentation. It depends on different data sources and several analysis scripts described below. ### Data - 1.6km International Wealth Index Estimates by Lee and Braithwaite (2022) and 2.4km Relative Wealth Index Extimates by Chi et al. (2022) for South Africa are included in the repo as csv files under `data/`. - 463.8m VIIRS Stray Light Corrected Nighttime Day/Night Band Composites Version 1 from Earth Observation Group are available through Google Earth Engine. This research uses annual median composites of the data. These can be created and downloaded, together with the monthly images, through `code/south_africa_nightlights.ipynb`. For the time being, the extracted monthly and annual median composite images are available through my Google Drive. - An improved Annual Median Composite (V2.1) of the VIIRS Nightlights, also at 463.8m resolution, for South Africa is included under `data/SA_VNL_v21/`. The corresponding global image was downloaded from here and cropped to South Africa using a rectangular bounding box. This image is used for all geospatial analysis, V1 images are only used to generate time series. A variant of this image with zeros replaced by `NA`'s is included for visualization purposes. - 1km Population Estimates (UN-Adjusted) for South Africa are available from WorldPop. These are easily downloaded with the script `code/download_SA_pop.R`. - Various Official GINI Estimates: `data/SA_GINI` has estimates from the World Inequality Databse (extracted using the STATA API) and Standardized World Inequality Database. Furthermore `data/GeospatialGinisData.xlsx` has nightlights-based GINI estimates for all countries from 1992-2013, based on the old DMSP-OLS satellite and the work of Galimberti et al. (2020), downloaded from here. - Spatial Tax Panel v3.7. You can get it by filing a request to Nomonde Mathambo: nmathambo@hsrc.ac.za or co …