Estimating Sub-National GDP With Satellites And Machine Learning

Good accounting and tax data isn't available everywhere and not at a very fine grained level. A new study has used satellite remote sensing and a machine learning model to estimate GDP at a very local level from proxies for GDP.

Figure 1 Estimates of local GDP and GDP per capita for 2019 at the 1-degree resolution

For the most part, the estimates are in line with expectations from more direct measurements of GDP that are less geographically local. But there are doubtful aspects of it. The disparities between north India and southern India, for example, seem to be greatly understated. Likewise, there should be stronger peaks in different places in Indonesia.