Satellite photographs of countries’ night-time lights could be used to forecast US exports, says a paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas.  

“We find that a forecasting model using monthly lights data generates significantly lower forecasting errors than a quarterly GDP model,” say the authors, Jun Nie and Amy Oksol.

The researchers have created an index of economic activity of US major trading partners based on night-time lights. Satellite images show different countries’ night