It’s a simple question, but are a lot of people burning the midnight oil? That might be a good clue as to how healthy the economy of a given location is.
Bloomberg reports that Japanese financial research and technology firm Nowcast is examining and comparing changes in night-time illumination, as captured on satellite images, and generating predictions of changes in a country’s GDP from that information. It correlates the findings with statistics taken from industrial production and trade.
According to the company’s CEO Ryota Hayashi, early tests of the methodology in Japan have shown promising signs. Nowcast’s predictions were more accurate than surveys made by economists six weeks prior to the release of economic data.
Nowcast hopes its ability to accurately predict GDP well ahead of time will attract customers who otherwise would only have quarterly GDP data to rely on for their investment decisions. “Using three-month-old factors in your models is far from ideal,” Hayashi told Bloomberg.
The idea isn’t totally new. A group of economists in 2012 found that light intensity at night could be used to infer levels of economic activity, and could be particularly helpful if traditional forms of data were not reliable or available. But Hayashi told Bloomberg that Nowcast was the first service provider to use night-time illumination to project economic growth.
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The company aims to start providing light-driven growth forecasts for places like Japan, China, Taiwan, India and the U.S. as soon as next February.
