Center for Data Innovation – referencing this Washington Post article: Exposing Faked Economic Data – “Louis Martinez, a professor at the University of Chicago, has published an analysis of 25 years of satellite data that suggests China, Russia, and other authoritarian countries routinely falsify their gross domestic product (GDP). Martinez analyzed changes in nighttime light levels in satellite imagery, which can serve as a measure of economic activity, and found that in free democracies such as the United States and Canada, a 10 percent increase in average nighttime light intensity in a year correlated with a 2.4 percent increase in GDP for that year. However countries ranked as the least free, according to watchdog organization Freedom House, reported between a 2.9 to 3.4 percent increase in GDP for the same light intensity increase, suggesting those countries fake their GDP reports to maintain political power.”