Economic Development from Nighttime Lights

The Charter Cities Institute is helping governments worldwide kick start economic development by building new cities with new rules. They’ve asked us for help with proving that changes in business regulations can increase employment, wages and other important social factors by studying Special Economic Zones, which have similar changes in rules but are much smaller.

To do this analysis, we will be linking a dataset of special economic zones to satellite images of nighttime lights in a project that combines geographic data, raster images, statistics and data science. If you are interested in joining the project, join us for the kick off meeting this Thursday, and signup for the project by creating an account on our project management site. You can learn more about the project at the project website.

Here is an example of the kind of work we will be doing, a montage of light intensity of second level administrative regions in South Korea in 2018.