Satellite Imagery for Studying Development? The Italian case study

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a well-known measure of development published since the 90s by the United Nation. Among the criticisms of HDI, there are undeniable problems in data collection that can frustrate comparisons between countries. In fact, for some countries old data only are available and few others have not even that. Elvidge et al. (2012) proposed the Night Light Development Index (NLDI), that can be computed solely from nighttime satellite imagery and population density, therefore without monetary data and with ease in data collection. The NLDI, that is a inequality measure of light distribution among inhabitants, has a strong correlation with the HDI at country level. In this paper we show that NLDI can produce the same values for very different development levels. Therefore, a simple correction (NLDI*) for overcoming this drawback is introduced. The original NLDI and our correction have been computed for the Italian case study, that is, the whole territory, the geographical areas (NUTS-1), regions (NUTS-2) and few provinces (NUTS-3) have been derived. The values obtained have been compared with those of others indexes to better understand the meaning of NLDI* in a particular context like the Italian one.