Keating relays a study that uses nighttime satellite photography to illustrate economic changes over time:
In a recent NBER working paper (summary here), Maxim Pinkovskiy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Xavier Sal-i-Martin of Columbia University used luminosity as measured by NOAA weather sattelites as an “independent measurement of true income.”
The comparison above shows a decade of change in sub-Saharan Africa. Angola (the third country from the bottom on the west coast) has many more lights in 2009 than in 2000, as you might expect from a country whose GDP per capita has nearly doubled. Zimbabwe, on the other hand, “has fewer lights, because of its economic collapse under the disastrous hyperinflationary policies of Robert Mugabe.”
The Dish 