Dr Samuel Wills Releases Working Paper on Poverty Measure Revealing Inequalities in Oil-Rich Countries

Junior Research Fellow in Economics Dr Samuel Wills and his co-author Brock Smith have released a working paper entitled ‘Lost in the Dark? Oil and Rural Poverty’.

The researchers are based in the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (OxCarre) at the University of Oxford Department of Economics.

Their new paper proposes a new way of measuring rural poverty – by using satellites to count people who live in darkness at night – from which they were able to demonstrate that oil booms increase inequality and do not benefit the rural poor.

Two datasets from satellites were analysed: the first showed images of all the areas of the world that light up at night, and the second estimated populations using images of roads, buildings and other signs of human habitation. After Following comparison with household surveys, the researchers discovered that this method more accurately identifies people who are living in poverty, being faster, cheaper and resulting in better coverage.

The study has shown that oil booms increase inequality and do not benefit the rural poor; the benefits of oil discoveries and high oil prices appear to be limited to towns and cities, which become more illuminated, here a proxy for greater economic activity.

‘We hope that this will help NGOs and aid agencies target their poverty interventions, and researchers to track how successful they are’, commented Dr Wills.

The paper has received international media attention, featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme and in the Hindustan Times, the Manila Times, The Atlantic, the University of Sydney News and on Phys.org.

Click here to read the research paper online (PDF). A more in-depth overview of the research paper’s findings and methods is available on the University of Oxford news pages. Further poverty maps are available to view on Dr Wills’ website.

A separate research paper produced by Dr Wills and his colleague Thomas McGregor, which draws a link between the quality of ocean waves and economic activity, was the subject of an article by The Economist earlier this week.