Regional Inequality in ASEAN Countries: Evidence from an Outer Space Perspective

ABSTRACT

The ASEAN countries are in a golden stage of development, although the uneven regional development remains a prominent challenge to integrated growth. The study tries to investigate regional inequality in ASEAN countries from an outer space perspective. It first estimates the relationship between nighttime light intensity and GDP per capita for the 10 ASEAN countries at the national level, based on which it predicts regional incomes at the subnational level to assess regional inequality and explores the affecting factors. The results indicate that regional inequality in the ASEAN region and economic development present an inverted N-shaped relationship. The overall inequality of the region is largely attributed to the uneven development between countries. It is also found that transportation, urbanization, openness, mineral rents, and tax revenue are all significantly relevant to regional inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional inequality
• ASEAN
• nighttime light luminosity
• economic development

Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1540496X.2022.2119810

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Bagui Scholars Program of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region “China-ASEAN Big Data Research” [BAGUI2019A39]; The Development Program of Ministry of Education for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Teams “China-ASEAN Regional Development Team” [IRT_17R27]; The “100 Talents Program” of Guangxi’s Universities [GUI2017(53)].