Working Paper: NBER ID: w22216
Authors: Maxim Pinkovskiy; Xavier Sala-i-Martin
Abstract: Nighttime lights data are a measure of economic activity whose error is plausibly independent of the measurement errors of most conventional indicators. Therefore, we can use nighttime lights as an independent benchmark to assess existing measures of economic activity (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2016)). We employ this insight to find out which vintages of the Penn World Tables and of the World Development Indicators better estimate true income per capita. We find that revisions of the PWT do not necessarily dominate their predecessors in terms of explaining nighttime lights (and thus, predicting unobserved true income). In particular, we find that the PWT 7.1 chain-based GDP series substantially outperforms the constant-price series in both PWT 8.0 and PWT 8.1, the two most recent vintages of the PWT. We additionally find that the World Development Indicators are as good, and often better, measures of unobserved true income as are any recent vintages of the Penn World Tables. Furthermore, we find that each new round of the International Comparisons Programme (ICP) has improved the WDI's ability to predict log unobserved true income. We also find that vintages tend to be good or bad at predicting unobserved true income roughly equally across the sample period, and do not tend to be particularly good at predicting unobserved income in the year of their price survey. We conclude that GDP series based on unadjusted domestic growth rates alone predict growth rates of true income better than series based on PPP adjustments to growth rates.
Keywords: nighttime lights; Penn World Tables; World Development Indicators
JEL Codes: O00; O40
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| measurement error in nighttime lights (C21) | errors in GDP measures (E20) |
| nighttime lights data (Y10) | GDP estimates accuracy (C82) |
| PWT revisions (P30) | predictive power for true income (D31) |
| WDI (L68) | predictive ability for true income (D31) |
| ICP rounds (F53) | WDI predictive ability (C52) |
| unadjusted domestic growth rates (O57) | true income growth rates (E25) |
| adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) (F31) | true income growth rates (E25) |