TY - BOOK ID - 64879315 TI - Illuminating Economic Growth AU - Hu, Yingyao. AU - Yao, Jiaxiong. PY - 2019 SN - 1498310788 1498302947 1498310753 PB - Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, DB - UniCat KW - Economic development KW - Development, Economic KW - Economic growth KW - Growth, Economic KW - Economic policy KW - Economics KW - Statics and dynamics (Social sciences) KW - Development economics KW - Resource curse KW - Evaluation. KW - Macroeconomics KW - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth KW - Environmental Accounts KW - Macroeconomics: Production KW - Methodological Issues: General KW - Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions KW - Informal Economy KW - Underground Econom KW - General Aggregative Models: General KW - Aggregate Factor Income Distribution KW - Economics of specific sectors KW - GDP measurement KW - Personal income KW - Informal economy KW - National accounts KW - Income KW - Economic sectors KW - National income KW - Informal sector KW - United States UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:64879315 AB - This paper seeks to illuminate the uncertainty in official GDP per capita measures using auxiliary data. Using satellite-recorded nighttime lights as an additional measurement of true GDP per capita, we provide a statistical framework, in which the error in official GDP per capita may depend on the country’s statistical capacity and the relationship between nighttime lights and true GDP per capita can be nonlinear and vary with geographic location. This paper uses recently developed results for measurement error models to identify and estimate the nonlinear relationship between nighttime lights and true GDP per capita and the nonparametric distribution of errors in official GDP per capita data. We then construct more precise and robust measures of GDP per capita using nighttime lights, official national accounts data, statistical capacity, and geographic locations. We find that GDP per capita measures are less precise for middle and low income countries and nighttime lights can play a bigger role in improving such measures. ER -