Evaluation of county-level poverty alleviation progress by deep learning and satellite observations

This study combines deep learning with multiple satellite datasets to estimate county-level economic development from 2008 to 2019 and assess the effect of the TPA policy for 592 national poverty-stricken counties (NPCs) at country, provincial and county levels. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is used to measure the affluence level. From 2014 through 2019, the 592 NPCs experience an average growth rate of per capita GDP at 7.6%±0.4%, higher than the average growth rate of 310 adjacent non-NPC counties (7.3%±0.4%) and of the whole country (6.3%).