Exploring Economic Activity from Outer Space: A Python Notebook for Processing and Analyzing Satellite Nighttime Lights

Nighttime lights (NTL) data are increasingly used as a proxy for monitoring national, subnational, and supranational economic activity. These data offer advantages over traditional economic indicators such as GDP, including greater spatial granularity, timeliness, lower cost, and comparability between regions regardless of statistical capacity or political interference. Despite these benefits, the use of NTL data in regional science has been limited. This is in part due to the lack of accessible methods for processing and analyzing satellite images.

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