Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space
提出用卫星夜间灯光数据补充官方经济增长统计的统计框架，发现对于国民账户质量差的国家，最优增长估计是传统测量与灯光预测的加权平均，两者权重相近。该方法还能测量次国家和超国家区域的经济增长，例如发现撒哈拉以南非洲沿海地区增长慢于内陆。
We 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. Our 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; we can measure growth for sub- and supranational regions. We show, for example, that coastal areas in sub-Saharan Africa are growing slower than the hinterland.