PLOS ONE

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Mapping urban living standards and

economic activity in developing countries with
energy data
Felix S. K. Agyemang ID1*, Rashid Memon2, Sean Fox3

1 Department of Planning and Environmental Management, University of Manchester, Manchester, United

Kingdom, 2 Social and Economic Survey Research Institute, University of Qatar, Doha, Qatar, 3 School of
Geographical Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom
a1111111111
* felix.agyemang@manchester.ac.uk
a1111111111
a1111111111
a1111111111
a1111111111 Abstract
Urban data deficits in developing countries impede evidence-based planning and policy.
Could energy data be used to overcome this challenge by serving as a local proxy for living
standards or economic activity in large urban areas? To answer this question, we examine
OPEN ACCESS
the potential of georeferenced residential electricity meter data and night-time lights (NTL)
Citation: Agyemang FSK, Memon R, Fox S (2023)
data in the megacity of Karachi, Pakistan. First, we use nationally representative survey
Mapping urban living standards and economic
activity in developing countries with energy data. data to establish a strong association between electricity consumption and household living
PLoS ONE 18(9): e0291824. https://doi.org/ standards. Second, we compare gridded radiance values from NTL data with a unique data-
10.1371/journal.pone.0291824 set containing georeferenced median monthly electricity consumption values for over 2 mil-
Editor: Faisal Abbas, National University of lion individual households in the city. Finally, we develop a model to explain intra-urban
Sciences and Technology, PAKISTAN variation in radiance values using proxy measures of economic activity from Open Street
Received: March 1, 2023 Map. Overall, we find that NTL data are a poor proxy for living standards but do capture spa-
Accepted: September 6, 2023 tial variation in population density and economic activity. By contrast, electricity data are an
excellent proxy for living standards and could be used more widely to inform policy and sup-
Published: September 28, 2023
port poverty research in cities in low- and middle-income countries.
Copyright: © 2023 Agyemang et al. This is an open
access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original
author and source are credited.

Data Availability Statement: The data I. Introduction

underpinning the paper has been made available. Rapid urban population growth in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) is contributing
Four datasets were used, including, household
income and expenditure survey data (HIES),
to the ‘urbanization of poverty’ [1]. Yet the true scale and nature of this challenge is unknown
electricity consumption, nighttime lights (NTL), and as we generally lack accurate and up-to-date data about household conditions in most cities in
OpenStreetMap (OSM). These can be accessed LMICs. Census data are infrequent and often undercount the urban poor [2–4], and tradi-
using the links below. HIES: https://www.pbs.gov. tional household surveys (e.g. Demographic and Health Surveys, or Living Standards Measure-
pk/content/microdata Electricity consumption: ment Study data) generally do not have large enough samples to provide representative data
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://reshare.
for individual cities, let alone smaller areal units such as neighbourhoods. These traditional
ukdataservice.ac.uk/856294/__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!
GYltBYJ3i-1Y489omSPD1XAdX8Q7M_PL_VG
data sources are therefore of limited use in rapidly growing cities where policymakers need
6LT9ZODmneA5sEYdmLdVUst6eMuGTEVEdavzyg timely and spatially explicit information to support decision-making and efficient resource
HQdjFYl6xdtosE4htz48ICIdsR5ow$ NTL: https:// allocation. Given that virtually all projected population growth in coming decades will be

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

eogdata.mines.edu/products/vnl/ OSM: https:// absorbed by urban areas in low- and middle-income countries [5], urban data deficits are a sig-
download.geofabrik.de/asia.html. nificant obstacle to global poverty alleviation and development efforts [6].
Funding: This research was supported by the UK Over the past decade, development economists have increasingly turned to non-traditional
Economic & Social Research Council (ES/ data sources, such as mobile phones, satellite imagery and volunteered geographic informa-
R009848/1) and International Growth Centre (PAK- tion. Of these, analysis of publicly available night-time light (NTL) emissions data captured by
20050). The funders had no role in study design,
satellites has become the most popular means of estimating sub-national variation in economic
data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or
preparation of the manuscript. activity and poverty in the absence of suitable administrative or survey data. It has long been
recognised that energy consumption and economic development go hand-in-hand at the
Competing interests: The authors have declared
country level [7], and this simple insight inspired the use of NTL emissions as a proxy for eco-
that no competing interests exist.
nomic activity in countries with limited data.
However, research to date has generally focused on the potential for NTL to capture pro-
duction and income at regional scales. Yet there is also a well-established relationship between
energy consumption and household welfare. Indeed, access to modern energy—i.e. energy
from clean, affordable and renewable sources, such as electricity—is itself a key indicator of
development [8–10], and was included as Goal 7 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Household energy consumption is closely associated with traditional measures of living stan-
dards, including income and consumption. While there is ongoing debate regarding the extent
to which improved access to modern energy can drive improvements in household living stan-
dards [11–15], there is abundant evidence from experimental and observational studies that
increases in income and assets are associated with increased total energy consumption (from
all fuel types) at the household level. Importantly, rising living standards are associated with
increased consumption of electricity in particular as households move up the ‘energy ladder’
(away from traditional biomass fuels) and diversify their ‘energy portfolios’ [16].
For example, a randomized controlled trial in rural India found that cash and asset transfers
increased total household fuel consumption and specifically electricity for lighting [17]. Similarly,
[18] used a Regression Discontinuity Design to measure the causal impact of a cash transfer pro-
gram on fuel choice and expenditure in Pakistan and found a significant impact on monthly per
capita fuel expenditure. These findings are consistent with observational studies based on survey
data in wide range of urban contexts, including Brazil [19], China [20, 21], Ghana [22], India
[23], Mexico [24] and South Africa [25]. The link between income and electricity consumption
(as opposed to other fuels) is particularly strong in urban areas where access is near universal:
globally, an estimated 97% of urban residents have access to electricity [10].
The strength of the income-energy consumption association varies by country and context
(weather and socio-cultural factors are also significant) but is highly consistent within each
context. Electricity consumption data may therefore be a useful proxy for household living
standards in urban areas in the absence of detailed data on household income, assets or expen-
diture. It has the added advantage of being measurable in near real-time, which may be partic-
ularly useful for policymakers seeking information about the household-level impacts of
economic shocks in LMICs.
There are two primary channels linking income to residential electricity consumption, both
mediated by household appliances—particularly those associated with lighting, cooling, heat-
ing, washing, and refrigeration, which constitute a substantial proportion of total household
electricity consumption. Rising income increases electricity consumption (a) directly due to
greater use of existing appliances in the home (intensive margin), and (b) indirectly through
the adoption and use of new appliances (extensive margin). Across countries there is roughly
an S-shaped relationship between income and ownership of energy-consuming appliances,
with low levels of ownership among at the bottom end of the income distribution, a sharp
increase at context specific thresholds and a plateau in the upper deciles [26]. In low- and mid-
dle-income countries, the adoption and use of new appliances is a strong indicator of

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

improvements in household living standards and can be observed indirectly with energy con-
sumption data.
Could nightlights serve as a proxy for living standards as well as economic activity in cities
in LMICs? Previous research has confirmed a strong correlation between NTL emissions and
GDP at various spatial scales [27–30] and has used NTL emissions to produce subnational esti-
mates of the incidence of poverty [31–33]. However, the accuracy of NTL predictions is highly
dependent on both the context and scale of application [28, 34]. The extent to which such data
could be used to identify variation in living standards or economic activity within cities in
LMICs remains unclear [35]. We tackle the question in the context of Karachi, Pakistan using
high resolution data from residential electricity meters. First, we demonstrate empirically that
household electricity consumption is a strong proxy for living standards in Pakistani cities.
We find a modest association between NTL emissions and median monthly electricity con-
sumption, but a visual inspection shows that even high-resolution NTL data disguise substan-
tial spatial heterogeneity in living standards across the city and can produce highly misleading
results. In contrast, proxies for population density, ‘establishment density’, social infrastruc-
ture, and road density explain over half of the observed spatial variance in NTL emissions.
These results are consistent with those of Mellander et al (2015), which used highly detailed
demographic and administrative data to test these associations in the Swedish context.
Our analysis makes two key contributions to the literature. First, we demonstrate that elec-
tricity data can be used to generate high-resolution areal estimates of living standards in urban
areas in the absence of traditional sources such as census or administrative data. These small
area estimates could be used to significantly improve the efficiency of social policy targeting in
cities [36]. Second, we show that even relatively high-resolution night lights data (VIIRS) on
their own are not suitable for estimating intraurban variation in living standards, even in very
large cities. However, they do capture information on spatial variations in population density,
infrastructure density and economic activity.
Georeferenced electricity data are not as readily available as NTL data and must be treated
with care due to privacy concerns, but they do exist in all cities and should be available to the
governments that either own or regulate supply networks. Given high rates of electricity access
in urban centres, such data could serve as a valuable tool for policy makers and researchers
concerned with understanding and raising urban living standards. We also show that volun-
teered geographic information, such as OSM data, may have useful modelling applications in
cities with scarce data.
In the next section we present the methodology underpinning the paper. This is followed
by results and discussion, structured into three subsections. The first subsection presents origi-
nal analysis of nationally representative household survey data to empirically establish a close
association between household electricity consumption and living standards in Pakistan and
demonstrates the potential use of electricity data for mapping urban living standards. The sec-
ond subsection compares NTL emissions and electricity consumption in Karachi using
gridded data. The last subsection models NTL emissions at the cell level as a function of proxy
measures for economic activity. Section IV concludes.

II. Methodology for mapping living standards with energy data

We use high resolution data from residential electricity meters in Karachi, Pakistan to assess the
potential of using NTL as proxy for living standard as well as economic activity. Karachi is a use-
ful case study as it reflects many of the challenges facing urban planners and policy makers in
LMICs: it is growing and changing fast, but data deficits obscure the nature of these changes.
According to the 2017 census, Karachi has a population of 16 million, but this is widely believed

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

to be an underestimate, and concerns about the accuracy of the census have led to a supreme
court case [37]. Moreover, even basic population statistics and socioeconomic data have yet to be
published as of December 2021. Nationally representative survey data are available every few
years, but due to the sampling methodology these cannot be used to make inferences about
household conditions within individual cities such as Karachi—only the urban sector in general.
To assess the correlation between NTL emissions (or ‘radiance’) and household living stan-
dards in Karachi, we exploit a unique georeferenced dataset containing information on
median monthly electricity consumption from over 2 million residential electricity meters in
the city. Previous studies have shown household energy consumption to be strongly correlated
with traditional measures of living standards, such as income, consumption, and asset owner-
ship—a relationship we confirm using nationally representative household data from Pakistan.
Electricity consumption can therefore serve as a proxy for household living standards in the
absence of spatially representative survey data within cities. We then develop a simple multi-
variate model to explain spatial variation in radiance drawing on OpenStreetMap data that
reflect spatial variation in economic activity and infrastructure.

Mapping living standards in Karachi, Pakistan with electricity data

The links between income, appliance ownership and electricity consumption noted above are
clearly evident in Pakistan. To demonstrate this, we present original analysis of nationally rep-
resentative survey data.
Our analysis uses data from the urban sub-samples of two rounds of the Household Income
and Expenditure Survey (HIES) conducted by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The HIES is
conducted at regular intervals and generally has around 8000 observations for the urban areas.
However, in 2015–16 an additional component, the Family Budget Survey, was added to the
HIES to derive weights for rebasing price statistics. The urban sample was therefore roughly
doubled to capture high price variation in urban areas. Our 2015/16 sample contains 15,934
observations while the 2018/19 sample contains 8805 observations.
First, to assess the relationship between appliance ownership and electricity consumption we
construct a household Electrical Appliance Index (EAI) from the 2018/19 round of the HIES
survey, weighting each appliance by the intensity of its energy requirements and expected daily
usage. This was the only survey round for which the necessary asset data were available.
The 2018/19 HIES contains information on (a) appliances possessed in the last month and
(b) appliances possessed in the last one year. Since the electricity expenditure data is available
for the last one month, we use (a). Individually, washing machines, televisions and refrigera-
tors are the most common appliances owned by households in the lowest deciles, with owner-
ship of other appliances only increasing significantly after the sixth consumption decile. A
similar pattern was found in India [38]. To construct the electrical appliance index, we
weighted each appliance by the intensity of usage. Data on an appliances’ energy consumption
were gleaned from several sources:
1. https://savejoules.com/refrigerator-brands.html This website provides a list of appliances
manufactured by local brands, as well as their electricity consumption ratings. We chose
the energy consumption of the median appliance to serve as weights.
2. https://energyusecalculator.com/electricity_microwave.htm This website was used for
microwaves and irons since these were unavailable in the list in (1).
3. https://www.bijlibachao.com/air-conditioners/desert-air-coolers-better-option-than-air-
conditioners-for-hot-and-dry-places.html This site was used to construct relative weights
of air coolers.

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Table 1. Electrical appliances and their expected power consumption.

Electrical Appliances Electricity Usage (KWh per month) Expected Usage (hours per day)
Television (CRT/ Flat Screen) 11 3
Fridge 73 24
Freezer 65 24
Washing Machine 31 1.5
Air Conditioner 127 8
Air cooler 21 8
Fan 22 10
Microwave 18 0.5
Iron 15 0.5
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t001

The latter site was the most informal. However, air coolers are ubiquitous in lower middle-
income classes in Pakistan and should not be ignored. But since these appliances are often
made in small workshops rather than large factories, power ratings were difficult to come by.
The final weights in estimated KWh per month are presented in Table 1.
Next, we then calculated average monthly electricity consumption in kilowatt hours (kw/h)
for each household from monthly expenditure on electricity using government notified tariff
information from the respective rounds of the Economics Survey of Pakistan. Electricity con-
sumption is measured at the household level to maintain consistency with the remainder of
the paper which uses household level meter data.
The HIES surveys contain information on electricity expenditure in the month before the
survey. We estimated units of electricity consumed by using the tariff structure announced by
the Government of Pakistan, which took effect in 2019 (see Table 2). Since information on sales
tax on electricity in 2015–16 was not unavailable, consumption was estimated using net expen-
ditures in 2018–19 but gross expenditures in 2015–16. The HIES 2018–2019 began in July 2018
and ended in August 2019, which means the tariff structure changed in the middle of this survey
round. However, it was possible to identify which households were surveyed in each year and
we used the relevant price structure to estimate unit consumption. The distribution of the sam-
ple across different districts is available upon request. Table 3 shows the thresholds values for
classifying households into electricity consumption deciles for each round of the survey.
Importantly, electricity consumption varies by geography and season, and the HIES data
were collected over the course of a year. This could introduce a significant source of measure-
ment error given that respondents are asked only about the past months’ electricity expendi-
ture. Despite efforts to account for this in the sampling procedure, we find some geographic
bias in the season of enumeration. One district contains no winter observations and a further

Table 2. Tariff Structure announced by Government of Pakistan.

Tariff Slab Tariff Effective June 2015 to December 2018 (Rs.) Tariff Effective from January 2019 (Rs.)
Up to 50 units 2.00 2.00
0–100 units 5.79 5.79
101–200 units 8.11 8.11
201–300 units 10.2 10.2
301–700 units 16.00 17.6
Above 700 units 18.00 20.7

Source: Government of Pakistan 2019 and 2020 Consumer End Tariff Structure

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t002

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Table 3. Threshold values for electricity consumption (Unit) deciles.

Unit decile 2015–16 2018–19
Min Max Min Max
1 .85 73.80 18.22 87.45
2 74.98 102.37 87.59 132.66
3 102.90 123.45 133.70 153.47
4 123.98 155.07 154.51 184.69
5 155.91 176.15 186.45 212.65
6 176.67 197.22 213.06 229.19
7 197.54 231.31 229.44 270.56
8 232.15 273.21 271.39 311.71
9 273.88 363.05 312.88 402.81
10 365.40 3593.80 403.54 2987.95

Source: Authors’ calculations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t003

three contain no spring observations. More problematically, twenty percent of the sample was
enumerated in the summer, when demand for electricity intensive cooling appliances is high-
est, and five of 29 districts were not enumerated in the summer at all. Since poor households’
electricity consumption would not change by much in summer and richer households’ elec-
tricity consumption would (due to a higher probability of owning air coolers or air condition-
ing units), this geographical imbalance may introduce a downward bias in estimates.

Assessing the relationship between NTL and living standards within

Karachi
To assess the potential for NTL data to serve as a proxy for living standards we compare high-
resolution NTL data to georeferenced residential electricity consumption data in Karachi.
There are two primary sources for NTL data used for economic analysis: the Defense Meteoro-
logical Satellite Program (DMSP) managed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) and the Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument car-
ried by a joint NOAA/NASA mission. Both products are publicly available. The DMSP data,
which covered the period 1992–2013, have been more widely used by economists than the
more recent VIIRS data, which begins in 2012 and runs to the present [39]. However, VIIRS
data are increasingly preferred due to fewer errors and higher resolution, which is particularly
important for subnational analysis and small are estimation (see [39, 40]). Given that we do
not need a long time series but rather seek to validate the NTL data through cross-sectional
analysis in 2019, we use the higher resolution VIIRS data. Moreover, it is unlikely that DMSP
data could be used for intra-urban analysis of economic activity given problems with “blurring,
coarse resolution, no calibration, low dynamic range, top-coding, and unrecorded variation in
sensor amplification” [39]. By contrast, VIIRS data appear to do a much better job of capturing
variation in economic activity within cities (ibid). For our statistical analysis we use average
monthly radiance values from 2019 from the Annual VNL V2 product, which has a spatial res-
olution of 500m2 [41]. Median night light radiance values were calculated for each 500m2 cell.
Why might we expect NTL emissions to correlate with household living standards? In rela-
tively densely populated areas, light is emitted from buildings, outdoor lighting infrastructure
(e.g., streetlamps, signal towers etc) and vehicles. In theory, wealthier people may be likely to
a) use more lighting, b) live in areas with higher quality lighting infrastructure, and c) use pri-
vate vehicles. If true, it is possible that NTL emissions might capture variation in the relative

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

wealth of neighbourhoods within a city. An obvious confounding factor is population density:

in cities, poor people tend to live at higher densities than richer people (all else equal), and pre-
vious research has shown that NTL emissions capture information on population density [35,
40]. As a result, the amount of light observed in any given cell would likely be a joint function
of relative wealth and population density. A second confounding factor may be the share of
light being emitted from non-residential areas in a city. Factories, retail districts, and transport
infrastructure are all examples of non-residential sources of light that may obscure any under-
lying association between residential energy consumption and NTL emissions. However, to
date it has not been possible to directly assess the association between living standards and
NTL emissions within cities in a LMIC context. Electricity consumption data allow us to make
such an assessment.
The residential electricity data, which serves as our ‘ground-truthing’ layer, was provided
by K-Electric (KE), the monopoly provider of electricity in Karachi. The data consist of average
kilowatt hours (kw/h) of electricity consumed per month per meter between 1 April 2019 to 31
March 2020 (just before the economic impacts of Covid-19 became salient). The residential
electricity tariffs are fixed across space at any given point in time in Pakistan, thereby eliminat-
ing potential biases associated with variation in price elasticities of demand across the city.
Thus, whilst tariffs are not necessarily the same across Karachi, when prices change, all places
in the city are equally affected. The raw data included 2.5 million residential meters in Karachi
and surrounding rural areas. Observations falling outside of the urban boundary were dis-
carded (313,446) leaving a sample of roughly 2.08 million. Of these, 136,088 negative values
were treated as anomalies and discarded, along with all values between 0 and 1 (34,246). Values
between 0 and 1 were dropped to eliminate plausibly unoccupied properties. A single unit of
consumption translates into roughly 30 hours of use of a standard lightbulb in a month, which
we take as a reasonable lower-bound threshold. The final sample consists of 2,048,418 observa-
tions. Finally, we calculated the median value of residential electricity consumption for each
cell in our 500m2 grid.
We have a high degree of confidence that these data cover the overwhelming majority of
households in Karachi. According to World Bank Development Indicators (accessed 8 March
2021) 100% of Pakistan’s urban population has access to electricity. Of the 8622 urban respon-
dents to the 2018/19 HIES survey 98.11% reported having access to electricity from the grid.
An independent survey conducted in one district in Karachi in 2018 (n�1000) found that 96%
of respondents received electricity bills each month [42, p. 85]. Importantly, the same study
found that many people do not pay their bills regularly, resulting in bills that do not necessarily
reflect actual consumption for any given time period. This makes billing data a less reliable
source of information on electricity consumption than observed kilowatt hours consumed.
There are some notable limitations to this data, which are common in cities in many
LMICs. While access coverage is generally comprehensive, illegal connections and sharing of
connections (legal and illegal) are not uncommon and can lead to biased estimates. Meter data
alone does not allow us to account for family size and composition, which can affect consump-
tion patterns. Where relatively accurate population figures are available at small spatial scales,
these unknowns could be partially accounted for, but this is rarely the case. Electricity con-
sumption data are also likely to miss the most marginalised individuals and groups, who may
have no access at all. Lastly, meters are not always located within the dwelling with which they
are associated—there are meter junctions in some areas—limiting the extent to which a meter
can be associated with a specific household or collection of households. Nevertheless, there are
few other sources that provide the scale and spatial granularity of residential electricity con-
sumption data, making it an attractive source for generating rough areal estimates of relative
living standards in urban areas.

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

The data underpinning this paper can be accessed here: HIES; electricity consumption;
NTL; and OSM.

III. Results and discussion

Electricity consumption and urban living standards in Pakistan
Fig 1 presents boxplots showing the association between household electricity consumption
and the EAI, with households clustered into electricity consumption deciles. As expected, the
association is positive (despite concerns about potential measurement error), with median val-
ues for the EAI increasing most abruptly in the lowest and highest deciles—consistent with
previous findings. The Electricity Appliance Index explains 37 percent of the variation in
household electricity consumption once family size and dwelling size are controlled for in a
weighted OLS regression with clustered standard errors (results available on request).
Next, we construct an index of per capita household expenditure (on non-durables) as a
proxy for living standards. Economists have long preferred a money metric of utility in the
form of income or consumption [43], and consumption has overshadowed income as a mea-
sure of welfare at least since the World Bank started the Living Standards Measurement Sur-
veys (LSMS) in the mid-1980s [44].
As with many countries, Pakistan uses the HIES to estimate consumption-expenditure
based poverty lines. Our approach follows this tradition. We use the adult equivalency fol-
lowed by the Government of Pakistan in setting its poverty line to compute family size: one
child equals 0.8 adults. Here we can use both of the 2015/16 and 2018/19 samples to determine
whether there is a consistent relationship between electricity consumption and household
expenditure. Fig 2 presents boxplots showing the association between estimated household
electricity consumption and per capita expenditure.

Fig 1. Household electricity consumption & electrical appliance index in 2018/19.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.g001

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Fig 2. Household electricity consumption & expenditure per capita in urban Pakistan.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.g002

While not strictly monotonic (Median expenditure increases with electricity consumption
decile in all cases apart from the 6th decile of the 2018/19 survey round, which is slightly lower
than the median value in the 5th decile) the positive association between expenditure and elec-
tricity consumption is clear: higher levels of electricity consumption are systematically associ-
ated with higher levels of expenditure—our measure of living standards—across both the
2015/16 and 2018/19 survey rounds. Household level analysis shows that the correlation
between per capita expenditure and electricity consumption was 0.5 in 2015/16 and 0.4 in
2018/19.
Finally, we assess the marginal effects of per capita expenditure on electricity consumption
holding the EAI constant at low, medium, and high levels. As shown in Fig 3, at any given level
of electrical appliance ownership there is a positive association between expenditure and elec-
tricity consumption (i.e. positive intensive margin).
In sum, there is a strong association between electricity consumption, electrical appliance
ownership and household expenditure. Given that household expenditure is a well-established

Fig 3. Marginal effects of per capita expenditure on electricity consumption.

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

and robust indicator of living standards, electricity consumption data can serve as a useful
proxy indicator. However, measuring energy consumption with household surveys is costly,
time-consuming and does not provide spatially explicit data at sufficient resolution to inform
urban planning and policy making within individual settlements. Moreover, expenditure data
from surveys can introduce measurement errors that can be avoided with direct observation of
energy consumption. Direct observations of kilowatt hours consumed at the household level
can therefore be used as a reasonably reliable proxy for living standards in the absence of
detailed data on income and expenditure.

NTL emissions and living standards

We calculated the median value of residential electricity consumption for each cell in Karachi
(see section II). Table 4 shows that median cell radiance is positively and significantly associ-
ated with median residential electricity consumption (R2 = .19) in a simple bivariate regres-
sion. To assess the spatial pattern of this correlation, Fig 4 shows the radiance and electricity
values mapped onto greater Karachi. Results are reported in deciles as we are primarily inter-
ested in relative living standards with clear thresholds—standard practice in living standards
measurement for policy applications. This approach also strengthens privacy protections by
expanding the range of potential values that could theoretically be attributed to any individual
household within a cell.
While there is broad correspondence in some central areas, there are also notable differ-
ences that illustrate the limitations of using VIIRS data as a proxy for living standards within
cities. Area A shows a peninsula in Karachi South that contains diverse neighbourhoods. The
south-eastern section contains a neighbourhood known as Clifton—one of the wealthiest in
the city. On the north-west side are a collection of much poorer settlements adjacent to major
port facilities. The electricity consumption data reflect these socioeconomic geographies while
the radiance data would miss-classify Clifton as one of the poorest areas of the city and some
of the poorer neighbourhoods as relatively wealthy. Area B encompasses the old city centre
close to the commercial port, including areas such as Lyari, which is one of the most densely
populated neighbourhoods in the city and contains a mix of poor and middle/upper-middle
income residents. Again, the KE data reflect this diversity while the radiance data would rank
this as one of the wealthier parts of the city. Finally, area C on the map contains Malir Canton-
ment—an area that contains both a military base and a civilian residential area that has some
of the most expensive property prices in the city.
This visual comparison shows that while radiance is significantly correlated with electricity
consumption (and by extension living standards) the spatial overlap is quite limited. As these
case studies demonstrate, this appears to be caused by the fact that NTL emissions are captur-
ing information about population density and non-residential sources of emissions. Small area
population estimates from the 2017 Pakistan census are not available for Karachi and alterna-
tive products that provide such data from models (e.g., WorldPop) use NTL data as an input,

Table 4. OLS model: Radiance & residential electricity consumption.

Dependent variable = Median electricity consumption
(1) (2) (3)
Radiance 4.504*** (0.138) 4.601*** (0.164)
Meter count 0.059*** (0.004) -0.005 (0.004)
2
R 0.19 0.05 0.19

*** p < 0.01

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t004

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Fig 4. Spatial comparison of median electricity consumption and radiance in Karachi (deciles).
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.g004

creating concerns of endogeneity in this case. Given the near ubiquity of residential meters in
the city, the meter count is the best possible proxy available.
We find that residential meter count per cell is more strongly correlated with radiance (R2
= .29) than median consumption values. This is consistent with case studies presented above.
The wealthy neighbourhood of Clifton is less densely populated than those directly adjacent to
the port; the neighbourhoods captured in area B are some of the most densely populated in the
city; and Malir Cantonment (circle C) is effectively a low-density wealthy suburb.
If it is the case that wealthy people produce more light than poor people, all other things
equal, then controlling for population density might yield a stronger association. In a simple
OLS model with meter count and radiance as explanatory variables, and median consumption
as the dependent variable, the R2 doesn’t change at all, and the meter count variable becomes
insignificant (Table 4).
In sum, high-resolution NTL emissions do not appear to provide spatially accurate infor-
mation about the distribution of living standards within a large city like Karachi. However,
such data may still provide useful information on the spatial distribution of economic activity.

Estimating NTL emissions with Open Street Map data

To assess the correlation between radiance and economic activity, [35] used high resolution
data on the number of establishments, number of employees per cell, and wage bills (i.e. where
wages were earned) as measures of activity in the Swedish context. Given that such detailed
data are not available in Karachi, we extract georeferenced information on ‘points of interest’
(POIs) and land use from OpenStreetMap (OSM) to serve as proxies.

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Table 5. Descriptive statistics (n = 4588).

Min Max Mean Std 1st Quartile Median 3rd Quartile
NTL average radiance 0 129 26 21 8 19 39
Median consumption (kw/h) 0 7013 155 221 0 133 224
KE meter count (population) 0 8794 487 839 0 39 732
Road density 0 .07 .02 .02 .01 .02 .03
ESI POI count 0 144 2 7 0 0 1
ESI POI count (buffer) 0 425 25 51 0 4 24
Distance to ESI POI 0 5562 617 834 0 279 937
Distance to economic land use 0 9248 1638 1599 404 1251 2438
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t005

There are 105 types of POIs listed for Karachi, ranging from banks and supermarkets to
schools and hospitals to fountains and parks. These were divided into three classes: Economic,
Social Infrastructure and Other. We identified 60 Economic POI labels, including banks,
ATMs, markets, retail shops, hotels, bakeries, etc. We classified 25 as Social Infrastructure,
comprised of schools, medical facilities such as hospitals, government facilities, community
facilities, and water and sanitation facilities. The 20 remaining miscellaneous POI labels were
classed as Other and discarded from the analysis. In total, there are 9342 POIs in the cleaned
dataset; 7145 of which are Economic, with the remaining 2197 falling into the Social Infra-
structure category.
From these data we create measures of ‘local’ POI density and ‘neighbourhood’ POI density
proximity on the assumption that the concentration of Economic and Social Infrastructure
(ESI) POIs in a place is a reasonable proxy for economic activity. The ‘ESI POI count’ variable
is the sum of all POIs within each cell; the ‘ESI POI count (buffer)’ variable captures all the
POIs outside of the cell within a 708-meter radius of the edge of the cell. This ensures that all
POIs in adjacent cells are accounted for. This neighbourhood measure is important because of
overglow: light emitted in a cell may bleed into a neighbouring cell and increase the observed
radiance value in that second cell. We expect a positive association between both the ESI POI
count and radiance, as well as ESI POI count (buffer) and radiance. However, as the descrip-
tive statistics in Table 5 show, the overwhelming majority of cells contain 1 POI or less. In the
OLS model presented below we therefore include a simple dummy variable that takes a value
of 1 if there are two or more POIs in a cell (‘ESI POI count (dummy)’).
We also calculate the Euclidean distance (in meters) from the centroid of each cell to the
centroid of the nearest cell containing one or more ESI POIs to capture wider neighbourhood
effects as the degree of overglow varies according to the brightness of lights being emitted.
Finally, as a complementary measure of economic activity in the neighbourhood, we extracted
data on the presence of commercial, retail and industrial land uses to identify cells that contain
one or more of these. Many cells have economic land use classifications but no POIs. For
example, there are large areas in Landhi, an industrial municipality in the south-eastern part of
the city containing a mix of commercial and residential properties, which have no POIs but
significant manufacturing facilities. Adding land use allows us to capture these economic activ-
ities that would otherwise be missed with sole reliance on the POI data. As with the POI dis-
tance measure, we created a variable that captures the distance between the observed cell and
the nearest cell with an economic land use of any kind.
Finally, we extracted information on the road network and created a Road Density variable,
defined as the total length of road observed within each cell divided by the cell area. To control
for population density, we use the count of electricity meters per cell from the KE dataset.
Table 5 summarises the data used in our model.

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Table 6. Bivariate correlations between radiance and economic proxy indicators.

Dependent variable = median radiance
Coefficient Std error R-squared
KE meter count (population) 0.014*** 0.000 0.29
Road density 749.158*** 25.622 0.16
ESI POI count 1.170*** 0.042 0.15
ESI POI count (dummy) 27.480*** 0.665 0.27
ESI POI count (buffer) 0.259*** 0.005 0.39
Distance to ESI POI -0.0133 *** 0.000 0.27
Distance to economic land use (m) -0.006*** 0.000 0.19

*** indicates p < 0.01

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t006

It is important to note that OpenStreetMap data are crowd-sourced and cannot be com-
pared directly to rigorously catalogued and curated administrative data. There are unknown
biases in the likelihood of any particular point of interest, or commercial establishment, or
road being included in the data. The data cannot be treated as representative. However, the
very nature of this data generation process may ultimately yield useful information for the
application at hand: the probability that information will be voluntarily added to the open-
source data is likely affected by the economic value or interest of the places and features added
to the map. If NTL emissions reflect economic activity, and the density of information in any
given place in the OSM database is at least a rough reflection of the density human economic
activity in a place, we would expect to find a correlation.
Table 6 shows simple bivariate correlations between each of our explanatory variables and
median cell radiance. The indicators with the greatest explanatory power are ESI POI count
(buffer) (R2 = .39), KE meter count—our proxy for population density—(R2 = .29), ESI POI
count (dummy) (R2 = .27), and Distance to ESI POI (R2 = .27).
Next, we create a multivariate model with two components: a ‘local’ component that
includes the variables observed within the cells and a ‘neighbourhood’ component including
the buffer and ‘distance to’ measures. As Table 7 shows, the local component accounts for just
over 40 percent of variance individually while the neighbourhood component explains 54 per-
cent of variance. When combined, the model explains just over 60 percent of variation in radi-
ance. In an OSM-only model (i.e., omitting the proprietary KE data on meter counts) the

Table 7. Multivariate model of cell radiance.

Dependent variable = median cell radiance
Local Neighbourhood Full Full (OSM only)
Meter count 0.009*** (0.000) 0.006*** (0.000)
Road density 174.392*** (26.066) 141.641*** (21.860) 331.359*** (19.900)
ESI POI dummy 18.823*** (0.654) 5.293*** (0.627) 6.743*** (0.644)
ESI POI count (buffer) 0.195*** (0.005) 0.144*** (0.005) 0.158*** (0.005)
Distance to ESI POI -0.007*** (0.000) -0.005*** (0.000) -0.005*** (0.000)
Distance to economic land use -0.003*** (0.000) -0.003*** (0.000) -0.003*** (0.000)
R2 0.41 0.54 0.61 0.58

Note: Standard error in parentheses.

*** p < 0.01
** p < 0.05

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0291824.t007

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

model explains 58 percent of variation in observed radiance. All coefficients are significant
and show the expected sign.
These results suggest that radiance is a joint function of population density, infrastructure
density, and economic activity, as measured by the density of ‘points of interest’ and land use
in and around cells. Our findings echo those of [35] who conclude that “light is a restricted
proxy for economic activity at a micro-level” (pg. 5). The strong explanatory power of the
‘neighbourhood’ variables in this model also indicates high levels of spatial dependence in the
radiance data, undermining confidence in cell-level inference at the scale of 500m2. Given this
observation and the impossibility of untangling the demographic, infrastructural and eco-
nomic sources of light, NTL data cannot be used in isolation to infer spatial patterns of pro-
ductivity or living standards within large cities. However, it is likely that NTL data could be
used as an input to multivariate models or machine learning models that use multiple inputs
for estimation of economic variables.

IV. Conclusions
Economic output and living standards at the household level are both closely associated with
energy consumption. While night-time lights are a useful proxy for energy consumption, they
are not suitable for estimating spatial variation in economic output or living standards at the
intra-urban scale, even in a megacity such as Karachi. Instead, they reflect a combination of
population density, infrastructure density and economic activity.
By contrast, we have shown that residential electricity consumption data are an excellent
proxy for living standards, and there are clear benefits to using it. Electricity data can be used
at a high spatial resolution and can theoretically be collected in real time. These are valuable
attributes in rapidly changing cities in LMICs. Time-series consumption data could be used to
address important empirical questions related to urban poverty, inequality, and urban eco-
nomic development, as well as provide planners and policy makers with spatially explicit infor-
mation about living standards. More precise point estimates could be used for specific
research or policy applications, such as monitoring changes in local welfare due to an eco-
nomic shock. Indeed, access to the data used in this paper was made available to explore its
potential for providing policymakers with information for spatial targeting within the context
of the COVID crisis. However, given the potentially disclosive nature of this type of data, great
care is required in the reporting of such analysis to ensure maximum privacy.
Even accounting for measurement error associated with electricity theft, meter sharing and
alternative fuel use, there are few sources of data that can match the spatial coverage of electric-
ity data at such minimal cost. In cities where georeferenced household meter data are not avail-
able, or where the proportion of illegal connections is very high, data from transformers
(which typically service between ~50–150 households) could be used in conjunction with pop-
ulation estimates or ancillary data such as satellite imagery to generate similar small-area esti-
mates of living standards. Future research could assess this potential in a range of similar
urban contexts in other countries, but research partnerships with public and private providers
of electricity is required. However, such partnerships could rapidly improve our ability to mea-
sure and monitor energy poverty and living standards in urban areas in LMICs.

Acknowledgments
Agyemang (corresponding author): Department of Planning and Environmental Manage-
ment, University of Manchester (felix.agyemang@bristol.ac.uk). Memon: Social and Economic
Survey Research Unit, Qatar University (rmemon@qu.edu.qa). Fox: School of Geographical
Sciences, University of Bristol (sean.fox@bristol.ac.uk). We are grateful to Saba Asif and K-

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PLOS ONE Mapping urban living standards with energy data

Electric for the opportunity to explore the research potential of this data. We owe a special
thanks to Sidra Adil at the Collective for Social Science Research (CSSR) for research assis-
tance, as well as Haris Gazdar, Zaheer Gazdar and Hussain Bux Mallah for important insights.
We are also grateful for the valuable feedback provided by Ayesha Ali and Abu Baker Memon
at LUMS, Silvia Redaelli at the World Bank, and Yanos Zylberberg at Bristol University. This
research was supported by the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ES/R009848/1) and
International Growth Centre (PAK-20050).

Author Contributions
Conceptualization: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon, Sean Fox.
Data curation: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon, Sean Fox.
Formal analysis: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon, Sean Fox.
Funding acquisition: Sean Fox.
Methodology: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon, Sean Fox.
Project administration: Sean Fox.
Software: Felix S. K. Agyemang.
Validation: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon.
Visualization: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Sean Fox.
Writing – original draft: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Rashid Memon, Sean Fox.
Writing – review & editing: Felix S. K. Agyemang, Sean Fox.

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