Nighttime Lights over South Asian Cities

This paper uses night time lights data to help describe economic activity in 5 South Asian cities

• From: Department for International Development
• Published: 24 June 2014

• Country: Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka
• Document Type: Working Paper
• Theme: Economic Growth, Infrastructure
• Authors: Abrahams, Alexei

Abstract

This paper uses night time lights data to help describe economic activity in 5 South Asian cities: Kabul, Afghanistan; Auraiya and Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh; Amritsar, Panjab; and Kandy, Sri Lanka. The author intercalibrates the data so that it is comparable over time and performs a correction to account for overglow, which is the tendency of light to bleed or spill from light sources onto neighbouring areas. The paper also compares results and generates descriptive statistics.

This paper is part of the Research on Growth and Urbanisation in Low Income Countries programme

Citation

Alexei Abrahams (2014) Nighttime Lights Over South Asian Cities.World Bank, Washington, DC

Links

Nighttime Lights over South Asian Cities

Published 24 June 2014