Bright Lights of Cities: Reassessing Siberian Curse through the Lens of Nighttime Lights

With exploitation of satellite data, this paper uncovers the changes of economic activities in Russian cities from 1989 to 2012. Compared to the findings by population, satellite data allowed us to explore possibilities to understand the spread and growth in the intensity of economic activities in space and size. This paper examines the so called “Siberian Curse” where soviet era regional development policies, urban growth, and migration restriction may be affected so as to make more population living in colder regions. After about 20 years from the collapse of USSR, Siberian curse may be broken. Our results show that though population may be still in the similar trends, growth in lit area and lit intensity are observed in warmer regions suggesting the break of Siberian Curse. However, once a few outliers are dropped, the cities listed in Hill and Gaddy’s work The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia out in the Cold have positive and statistically significant growth in lit indicators, suggesting the break of Siberian Curse may take some more decades.