Finding the economic engines of a country

Economists and investors know about national GDP data. But this data is often doubted and always unevenly distributed. In some case, the national GDP data may even be unreliable because the country publishing it is, let’s say, unreliable in its relationship with the truth. In these instances, one can try to tap into other sources like customs data or satellite images.

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Jialing Zhang from the University of Chicago did something really cool (at least ‘cool’ if you are an econ nerd like me). They used a large variety of data sources from national GDP data to regional GDP data, satellite images of night lights, greenhouse gas emissions, population density, and ruggedness of terrain as well as natural gas flares to estimate GDP and GDP growth at extremely high resolution. At the extreme end, they use a resolution of 0.25⁰. That is an area roughly 28km (17.4 miles) from north to south and the same from east to west at the equator.

The idea behind this project is that it will in the future allow to assess economic shocks in extreme local detail. Similarly, their data can be used to assess the regional and local impact of government policies.

Until we get there, we can at least take a look at some really cool maps because the data to 2021 has been made available here: https://bfidatastudio.org/project/local-economies-global-perspective-illuminating-subnational-gdp-worldwide/

The map below shows GDP per region in the year 2021. It’s immediately visible that major cities and agglomerations like London, Paris, or Moscow are the economic engines of most countries. But then there are other economic engines like the Midlands in the UK, the Ruhrgebiet and Southwest of Germany, or the tourist hotspots in on the Mediterranean coasts of Spain and Italy.

Economic output in 2021 across Europe

Source: Rossi-Hansberg and Zhang (2025)

When we look at GDP growth in 2021, the year of the Covid recovery, the picture changes. Now, the growth rates tend to be higher in areas that were harder hit by Covid like the tourist hotspots in Italy or Croatia. Meanwhile rural areas that don’t have a large tourism industry like central and Western France, the Orkney Islands or the interior of southern Portugal show low growth. These areas are economically weak but didn’t suffer major losses in income from a lack of tourism. So, they lost less during the pandemic but also gained less after the pandemic.

Economic growth in 2021 across Europe

Source: Rossi-Hansberg and Zhang (2025)

I encourage you to play around with these maps in other regions and if you have connections to government officials that might find it useful, share the links with them. I am sure the professors at University of Chicago would be happy to discuss how their data can help governments measure the economic impact of policies.