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Satellite Data Strongly Suggests That China, Russia and Other Authoritarian Countries Are Fudging Their GDP Reports (washingtonpost.com)
Christopher Ingraham, writing for The Washington Post: China, Russia and other authoritarian countries inflate their official GDP figures by anywhere from 15 to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data. The working paper, by Luis R. Martinez of the University of Chicago, also found that authoritarian regimes are especially likely to artificially boost their gross domestic product numbers in the years before elections, and that the differences in GDP reporting between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries can't be explained by structural factors, such as urbanization, composition of the economy or access to electricity. Martinez's findings are derived from a novel data source: satellite imagery that tracks changes in the level of nighttime lighting within and between countries over time.
What you wrote is not how GDP is calculated. Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money (how often the average dollar is turned over per year). That's it. The US simply prints more money to show an improving GDP. This was done after 2008 to make the economy appear better than it was. In reality the velocity fell by 50%. So, the money supply was doubled. We Americas went about out merry ways thinking that all is well and getting better. Any country that uses fiat money can play this game, Russia and China included/
What a major fail. Data centres produce no visible light in sattelite imagery. Neither do banks, mines, crops (agriculture in general), I suspect larg portions of saudi oil-filled dessert would also be unlit and VERY few factories working 3 shifts have glass roofs. Large portions of german autobahn is unlit. Large portions of belgian is.
Some countries chose to fight light pollution. California was amongst the first to start looking into it. Based on this "research" California would also by lying about their GDP.
Someone needs to review this PhD thesis.
Can someone please downgrade this whole article back to the firehose somehow?
In the 1960s, Robert Heinlein went to the Soviet Union as part of an opening salvo of goodwill between the countries. He looked at the shipping and roads in and out of Moscow and realized there was no way it could support whatever X millions of people they were claiming to he on rough parity with New York.
It's been estimated it required about 50% of Soviet GDP to even maintain a facade of parity with the US military.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money
Your education is incomplete. There are multiple ways to calculate GDP and they use several of them for official numbers to ensure some amount of consistency. In principle each method should give (roughly) equal results though in practice it isn't always so easy. The Economist has a decent article on how it generally is calculated.