Nordhaus William D
Yale University, 28 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520-8268, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Mar 7;103(10):3510-7. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0509842103. Epub 2006 Feb 10.
The linkage between economic activity and geography is obvious: Populations cluster mainly on coasts and rarely on ice sheets. Past studies of the relationships between economic activity and geography have been hampered by limited spatial data on economic activity. The present study introduces data on global economic activity, the G-Econ database, which measures economic activity for all large countries, measured at a 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude scale. The methodologies for the study are described. Three applications of the data are investigated. First, the puzzling "climate-output reversal" is detected, whereby the relationship between temperature and output is negative when measured on a per capita basis and strongly positive on a per area basis. Second, the database allows better resolution of the impact of geographic attributes on African poverty, finding geography is an important source of income differences relative to high-income regions. Finally, we use the G-Econ data to provide estimates of the economic impact of greenhouse warming, with larger estimates of warming damages than past studies.
人口主要聚集在沿海地区，极少出现在冰原上。过去关于经济活动与地理关系的研究因经济活动空间数据有限而受阻。本研究引入了全球经济活动数据——G-Econ数据库，该数据库以1度纬度乘1度经度的尺度衡量所有大国的经济活动。文中描述了该研究的方法。对这些数据的三种应用进行了调查。第一，发现了令人困惑的“气候-产出反转”现象，即按人均衡量时温度与产出之间的关系为负，而按单位面积衡量时则为强正相关。第二，该数据库能更好地解析地理属性对非洲贫困的影响，发现相对于高收入地区，地理因素是收入差异的一个重要来源。最后，我们使用G-Econ数据来估算温室气体变暖的经济影响，得出的变暖损害估算值比以往研究的要大。
