Roberts Mark
Territorial Development Global Solutions Group; Urban, Disaster Risk, Resilience and Land Global Practice, The World Bank, Singapore Office, Singapore.
Dev Eng. 2021;6:100067. doi: 10.1016/j.deveng.2021.100067. Epub 2021 Jun 26.
Over the past decade, nighttime lights have become a widely used proxy for measuring economic activity. This paper examines the potential for high frequency nighttime lights data to provide "near real-time" tracking of the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis in Morocco. At the national level, there exists a statistically significant correlation between quarterly movements in Morocco's overall nighttime light intensity and movements in its real GDP. This finding supports the cautious use of lights data to track the economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis at higher temporal frequencies and at the subnational and city levels, for which GDP data are unavailable. Relative to its pre-COVID-19 trend growth path of lights, Morocco experienced a large drop in the overall intensity of its lights in March 2020 following the country's first COVID-19 case and the introduction of strict lockdown measures, from which it has subsequently struggled to recover. At the subnational and city levels, while all regions and cities examined shared in March's national decline in nighttime light intensity, some suffered much larger declines than others. Since then, the relative effects of the COVID-19 shock across regions and cities appear to have largely persisted. Notwithstanding these findings, however, further research is required to ascertain the exact causes of the observed changes in light intensity and to fully verify that the results are driven by anthropogenic causes.
在过去十年中，夜间灯光已成为衡量经济活动的一种广泛使用的替代指标。本文探讨了高频夜间灯光数据用于“近实时”追踪摩洛哥新冠疫情危机经济影响的潜力。在国家层面，摩洛哥整体夜间灯光强度的季度变化与其实际国内生产总值（GDP）的变化之间存在统计学上的显著相关性。这一发现支持谨慎使用灯光数据，以在更高时间频率以及在国家以下和城市层面追踪新冠疫情危机的经济影响，因为这些层面没有GDP数据。相对于新冠疫情前其灯光的趋势增长路径，摩洛哥在2020年3月出现首例新冠病例并实施严格封锁措施后，灯光总体强度大幅下降，此后一直难以恢复。在国家以下和城市层面，虽然所有被考察的地区和城市在3月都出现了全国范围内夜间灯光强度的下降，但有些地区和城市的降幅比其他地区和城市大得多。自那时以来，新冠疫情冲击在各地区和城市的相对影响似乎基本持续存在。然而，尽管有这些发现，仍需要进一步研究以确定观察到的灯光强度变化的确切原因，并充分验证结果是由人为因素驱动的。
