Mapping Economic Activity for the World

Posted Jul 14, 2008 to Economics, Mapping by Nathan  /  7 responses

Mapping Economic Activity for the World

The G-Econ (Geographically-based Economic data) group has worked on making economic data publicly available via Gross Cell Product (GCP). In other words, they've collected data for each 1x1 degree latitude by longitude cell on the globe. Above is a cell-by-cell globe mapping world population. Here's one that shows world rainfall.

Check out more of these pretty world maps posted to the G-Econ Flickr photo set.

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7 responses to "Mapping Economic Activity for the World"
  • Jon Peltier
    Jul 14, 2008, 7:50 am

    Yow! I saw the first map, and thought it depicted nuclear Armageddon, or maybe another dinosaur-killing asteroid.

  • DaveW
    Jul 14, 2008, 11:46 am

    Very pretty and potentially informative. BUT… very misleading. Take a look at the color renderings for the country data (apparently for 1990) on their site. According to their display, North Korea outperforms the US Midwest and most of Japan. I don’t think so.

  • ME
    Jul 14, 2008, 3:29 pm

    neat stuff, but the website hasn’t been updated since 2006 and the flickr set is 18 months old.

    Their documentation is pretty comprehensive and they readily admit that much of the data, particularly of poorer countries, is of middling reliability.

    From their documentation: “These data allow better integration of economic and environmental data to investigate environmental economics, the impact of global warming, and the role of geophysical factors in economic activity. On of the major results is to show that the true economic deserts of the globe are in Greenland, Antarctica, northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia.” I really have to wonder if the boonies of Canada are really less economically productive than the desert heart of the Sahara.

    It’s a tough project to get right. Downloading the spreadsheet of underlying data and sorting the data by various criteria is a lot of fun.

    And of courser, the more you examine the work, the more you realize that a lot of finessing had to go into painting a pretty picture.

  • Nathan
    Jul 15, 2008, 12:00 am

    the data are definitely should be considered with many grains of salt. but if you throw accuracy out the door, the maps are pretty :)

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