Working Paper #2018-041
Top Lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development
Tracking the development of cities in emerging economies is difficult
with conventional data. We show that satellite images of nighttime
lights are a reliable proxy for economic activity at the city level,
provided they are first corrected for topcoding. The commonly-used data
fail to capture the true brightness of many cities. We present a
stylized model of urban luminosity and empirical evidence which both
suggest that these 'top lights' can be characterized by a Pareto
distribution. We then propose a simple correction procedure which
recovers the full distribution of city lights. Our results show that the
brightest cities account for nearly a third of global economic activity.
Applying this approach to cities in Sub-Saharan Africa, we find that
primate cities are outgrowing secondary cities but are changing from
within. Poorer neighborhoods are developing, but sub-centers are forming
so that Africa's largest cities are also becoming increasingly
fragmented.
- Keywords
-
- Development
- urban growth
- night lights
- top-coding
- inequality
- JEL codes
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- O10
- O18
- R11
- R12
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Bluhm, R., & Krause, M. (2018). Top Lights: Bright cities and their contribution to economic development (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2018-041). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=7993