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In recent years, there has been an explosion of social science work using satellite imagery of luminosity as a proxy for economic activity. Pictures of North Korea at night—a black hole surrounded by the lights of China and South Korea—have become virtual clichés. However, GPS techniques allow us to disaggregate luminosity data down to pretty small pixels and thus conduct a variety of comparisons, including across regions and—much harder—over time. Given the paucity of other data, the use of luminosity has particular attraction for North Korea watchers.
Our entries on this topic can be found here, here and here. But Travis Pope, who has done the heavy lifting on this topic for this blog, has now also done a very useful summary of some of the technical issues for NK News. His article expands on the technical notes in our posts. Ole Jacob Skaatan, who has been covering this beat for NKNews, also has a cautionary post that summarizes what we do and don’t know, drawing on a number of researchers pursuing this line of work; that post can be found here. We hope that any other researchers working along these lines will feel free to post links to their work here.
