Spatiotemporal Analysis of Venezuela's Nighttime Light During the Socioeconomic Crisis

The lack of official statistics makes it difficult to assess Venezuela's economic situation during the socioeconomic crisis. In this article, we used Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) nighttime light images to evaluate Venezuela's crisis. The Hodrick-Prescott filter was used to decompose the sum of urban light (SUL) into two components: the sum of urban light trend (SULT) and the SUL cycle. Then, we proposed an index of nighttime light change ratio to estimate Venezuelan nighttime light dynamics. We found that Venezuela has lost 30.37% of its SULT from April 2012 to December 2018. The regression analysis shows that Venezuelan SULT had a strong relationship to a number of socioeconomic indicators: the SULT was positively correlated to crude oil production with R
²
of 0.9159, negatively correlated to dollar exchange rate with R
²
of 0.9516, and negatively correlated to the number of asylum seekers with R
²
of 0.8384. We also found that among the three states with a largest nighttime light decrease, the economy of two states was dominated by agriculture and that of one state was dominated by the oil industry. In the pixel analysis, compared with the urban cores, the suburbs of urban cores of 12 main cities had a higher percentage of SULT increased areas. Around the Venezuela-Colombia border, the SULT decreased in the Venezuelan side but increased in the Colombian side. Our analysis suggests that nighttime light imagery can help to assess Venezuela's situation during the crisis.