GeoDevelopment Observatory of Bolivia / Indicators
Night-time lights per capita
Nine years of VIIRS night-time lights per person for every municipality, with a long-run trend: a satellite proxy for local economic activity.
Annual night-time lights per capita for Bolivia’s 339 municipalities from 2012 to 2020: the summed radiance of the Earth Observation Group’s annual VIIRS night-time lights (version 2, background masked) over each municipality, divided by its WorldPop population, in natural logs. A Hodrick–Prescott trend (λ = 400) of the same series separates the long-run path from year-to-year noise; it is complete for every municipality, while the raw log is missing where a municipality had no measurable light. Night-time lights track electrification and economic activity where official local statistics are scarce.
Variables of ntl
ln_NTLpc: Log night-time lights per capita. Natural log of night-time radiance per person, ln(10⁸ × NTL / population). NTL is the sum over the municipality of the EOG Annual VIIRS Nighttime Lights V2 average radiance (background masked, 15 arc-seconds, nW/cm²/sr), extracted with AidData GeoQuery; population is the same year's WorldPop 1 km sum. Missing where no pixel remained lit after masking (2–15 municipalities a year).ln_t400NTLpc: Log night-time lights per capita (trend). Hodrick–Prescott trend (λ = 400) of the log of night-time lights per capita. The log of lights, gap-filled within each municipality by linear interpolation and extrapolation (and a fixed-effects prediction where needed), and the log of population are each HP-filtered and combined as ln(10⁸ × trend NTL / trend population). Complete for every municipality and year, including years where ln_NTLpc is missing.
Sources
- Elvidge, C. D., Zhizhin, M., Ghosh, T., Hsu, F.-C., & Taneja, J. (2021). Annual time series of global VIIRS nighttime lights derived from monthly averages: 2012 to 2019. Remote Sensing, 13(5), 922. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13050922
- WorldPop & CIESIN (2018). Global High Resolution Population Denominators Project (1 km aggregated, 2000–2020). University of Southampton and Columbia University. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (OPP1134076). https://doi.org/10.5258/SOTON/WP00647
- Goodman, S., BenYishay, A., Lv, Z., & Runfola, D. (2019). GeoQuery: Integrating HPC systems and public web-based geospatial data tools. Computers & Geosciences, 122, 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cageo.2018.10.009
- Runfola, D., Anderson, A., Baier, H., et al. (2020). geoBoundaries: A global database of political administrative boundaries. PLoS ONE, 15(4), e0231866. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0231866
- Mendez, C., Gonzales, E., Leoni, P., Andersen, L., & Peralta, H. (2026). DS4Bolivia: A Data Science Repository to Study GeoSpatial Development in Bolivia [Data set]. GitHub. https://github.com/quarcs-lab/ds4bolivia