Nighttime lights as a proxy for human development at the local level
Open accessAbstract
Nighttime lights, calculated from weather satellite recordings, are increasingly used by social scientists as a proxy for economic activity or economic development in subnational regions of developing countries where disaggregated data from statistical offices are not available. However, so far, our understanding of what nighttime lights capture in these countries is limited. We use geo-referenced Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 29 African countries to construct indicators of household wealth, education and health for DHS cluster locations as well as for grid cells of roughly 50 × 50 km. We show that nighttime lights are positively associated with these location-specific indicators of human development, and that the variation in nighttime lights can explain a substantial share in the variation in these indicators. We conclude that nighttime lights are a good proxy for human development at the local level.
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The R2 values in Table 2 are generally slightly lower than ranges reported in previous studies.
“Compared to previous studies of economic activity and nightlights, 𝑅 2 in Table 2 are in general slightly lower than ranges in previous studies [7, 15, 18, 29].”
From Under the Radar -- Auditing Fairness in ML for Humanitarian Mapping (2021) · cites this paper as [7]
The Results > Main results section reports how much variation in household wealth and other local development measures nighttime lights explain, providing figures for a previous study. Our copy does not give the citing paper’s Table 2 values, so it cannot establish that those values are generally slightly lower. (LLM, conf=0.78)
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- Authors
- Bruederle, A., & Hodler, R.
- Affiliations
- University of St.Gallen (CH)
- Corresponding author
- Hodler, Roland
- Venue
- PLOS ONE
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science (PLoS)
- Published
- 2018-09-05
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- e0202231
- ISSN
- 1932-6203 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC6124706
- OpenAlex
- W2742305379
- Cited by
- 259
- References
- 36
- Citations by year
- 2026: 19 · 2025: 31 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 36 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 58 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 13.90
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- PLoS ONE (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Alexandria (UniSG) (University of St.Gallen) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Universität St. Gallen (Basic Research Grant)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Impact of Light on Environment and Health
- Social Sciences › Transportation › Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis
- Social Sciences › Demography › Culture, Economy, and Development Studies
- Keywords
- nighttime lights, human development, proxy indicators, household wealth, subnational regions, developing countries, African countries, satellite remote sensing, local economic development
- MeSH terms
- Africa, Algorithms, Developing Countries, Geography, Humans, Lighting, Surveys and Questionnaires, Socioeconomic Factors, Time Factors, Models, Economic
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