Tracking Economic Activity in Response to the COVID-19 Crisis Using Nighttime Lights : The Case of Morocco
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 C...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2021
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/948831612451586556/Tracking-Economic-Activity-in-Response-to-the-COVID-19-Crisis-Using-Nighttime-Lights-The-Case-of-Morocco http://hdl.handle.net/10986/35130 |
| Summary: | 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 strong
correlation between quarterly movements in Morocco’s overall
nighttime light intensity and movements in its real GDP.
This finding supports the use of lights data to track the
economic impacts of the COVID-19 crisis at higher temporal
frequencies and at the subnational level, for which GDP data
are unavailable. Consistent with large economic impacts of
the crisis, Morocco experienced a large drop in the overall
intensity of its lights in March 2020, from which it has
subsequently struggled to recover, following the country’s
first COVID-19 case and the introduction of strict lockdown
measures. At the subnational level, while all regions shared
in March’s national decline in nighttime light intensity,
Rabat – Salé – Kénitra, Tanger – Tetouan – Al Hoceima, and
Fès – Meknès suffered much larger declines than others.
Since then, the relative effects of the COVID-19 shock
across regions have largely persisted. Overall, the results
suggest that, at least for Morocco, changes in nighttime
lights can help to detect the timing of changes in the
direction of real GDP, but caution is needed in using lights
data to derive precise quantitative estimates of changes in
real GDP. |
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