A new way to proxy levels of infrastructure development

Abstract

Researchers in many fields have needed to develop a measure of infrastructure, and many proxies have been used toward this end, such as night light data and the Digital Chart of the World. Yet there are issues in using these methods. This paper presents a new way of proxying infrastructure: analysing the file sizes of map images on the Bing, Google, OpenStreetMap and Sina websites. The paper also demonstrates four ways in which this can be achieved. This approach is by no means perfect and does not solve all of the difficulties presented by other methods. Nevertheless, it does provide a simple and functional alternative proxy for level of infrastructure development.