Updated Reproduction Package for - Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space - Biscaye

The authors develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventionally measured growth and growth predicted from lights. The estimates differ from official data by up to three percentage points annually. Using lights, empirical analyses of growth need no longer use countries as the unit of analysis; the authors can measure growth for sub- and supranational regions. The authors show, for example, that coastal areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing slower than the hinterland. (JEL E01, E23, O11, 047, 057)

The uploaded replication package duplicates much of what is in the authors' original thorough replication data (openicpsr.org), with some reorganization and additional documentation to support the user. JEL Classification:
E01 Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental AccountsE23 Macroeconomics: ProductionO11 Macroeconomic Analyses of Economic DevelopmentO47 Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output ConvergenceO57 Comparative Studies of Countries