Measuring the Imbalance of Regional Development from Outer Space in China

Abstract We develop a statistical framework to use the data of night-time-lights (DN) from satellite to augment official GDP measures, and a non-linear substitution relationship between DN and GDP is given. In this paper, we take advantage of DN instead of GDP to measure the imbalance of regional development (IRD) in China by using the method of bi-dimensional decomposition under the population-weighted coefficient of variation. The method enables us to analyze the contributions of DN components to within-region and between-regions inequality under the framework which has been proposed, we can get the conclusion that the imbalance between-regions rather than within-region is the main reason for the influence of IRD for the whole country in China.