Macroeconomic theories of growth and wealth distribution have an outsizedinfluence on national and international social and economic policies. Yet, dueto a relative lack of reliable, system wide data, many such theories remain, atbest, unvalidated and, at worst, misleading. In this paper, we introduce anovel economic observatory and framework enabling high resolution comparisonsand assessments of the distributional impact of economic development throughthe remote sensing of planet earth's surface. Striking visual and empiricalvalidation is observed for a broad, global macroeconomic sigma-convergence inthe period immediately following the end of the Cold War. What is more, weobserve strong empirical evidence that the mechanisms driving sigma-convergencefailed immediately after the financial crisis and the start of the GreatRecession. Nevertheless, analysis of both cross-country and cross-state samplesindicates that, globally, disproportionately high growth levels and excessivelyhigh decay levels have become rarer over time. We also see that urban areas,especially concentrated within short distances of major capital cities weremore likely than rural or suburban areas to see relatively high growth in theaftermath of the financial crisis. Observed changes in growth polarity can beattributed plausibly to post-crisis government intervention and subsidypolicies introduced around the world. Overall, the data and techniques wepresent here make economic evidence for the rise of China, the decline of U.S.manufacturing, the euro crisis, the Arab Spring, and various, recent, MiddleEast conflicts visually evident for the first time.
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