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Who Gets Public Goods? Using Satellite Imagery to Measure the Distribution of Rural Electrification

Journal article published in 1 by Brian Min
This paper was not found in any repository; the policy of its publisher is unknown or unclear.
This paper was not found in any repository; the policy of its publisher is unknown or unclear.

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Abstract

For scholars interested in the role of democracy on development outcomes, tracking the progress with which governments provide basic public services is hampered by inconsistent, inaccurate, or missing data. I propose a novel method to estimate the provision of rural electrification based on analysis of satellite imagery of the earth at night. Combined with high-resolution population maps, I generate new measures of the number of people living in unelectrified areas across the globe. Unlike data derived from official govern-ment statistics, the quality and precision of these new estimates are not correlated with political institutions or economic circumstances. After demonstrating the plausibility of my new estimates, I use regression anal-ysis to show that democratization is associated with an 8% decrease in the share of unelectrified populations even after controlling for differences in wealth, population density, and other factors.