Light pollution follows economic growth.
That's a bummer if you're sitting in a bustling city trying to look up at the stars. But it may be useful if you're staring down from space, trying to understand macroeconomics.
Economists have been looking for a while now at the relationship between "luminosity" and GDP. In one recent effort, a couple Yale economists use data culled from satellite images of 167 countries between 1992 and 2008. They try to figure out whether using luminosity adds to our understanding of economic output.
The answer is mixed.
The researchers separate countries into five categories, ranging from data-rich to data-poor. They find that luminosity adds useful information about economic output only in the most data poor countries.
In other words, it's only useful for countries where available economic data are really, really rudimentary – places like Angola, Chad, and Yemen.
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