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Measuring Development and Welfare: The Use of Night-lights to Evaluate Programs and Formulate Policy

This document explores the use of high-resolution nighttime satellite imagery as a tool to measure economic development and evaluate the impacts of public interventions, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). This is an efficient and alternative evaluation tool when there are no available traditional data sources such as household surveys and censuses in terms of coverage, frequency, accessibility, and representativeness to test results. Nighttime lights data emerge as a complementary and uniform source of information, capable of providing real-time and frequent, spatially detailed insights into human activity and economic outcomes, which is valuable for both academic research and Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) evaluations.

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Innovación | Investigación socioeconómica | Desarrollo | Economía | Bases de datos | Evaluación de impacto

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América Latina y el Caribe

URI

https://scioteca.caf.com/handle/123456789/2700

Date

2026-07-28

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6.1 Documentos de trabajo en investigación socioeconómica

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CC-BY-NC-ND
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as CC-BY-NC-ND
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Measuring Development and Welfare. The Use of Night lights to Evaluate Programs and Formulate Policy.pdf (1.3 MB)

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